Application Support Lead (SAP & Retail)

Key Responsibilities: Support Leadership - Lead and mentor the application support team (L1/L2), setting priorities, allocating work and coaching engineers on diagnostics and escalation. - Act as the L2/L3 escalation point for high-severity (P1/P2) incidents, coordinating response across IT, business and vendor teams. - Own SLA and KPI performance, and report on incident trends, ticket volumes, MTTR and recurring issues to management. Application & Integration Support - Lead support for SAP and retail applications, covering SAP, POS/BOS, web, mobile and loyalty platforms. - Support and monitor integrations and interfaces between systems (for example IDocs, middleware, APIs and EDI), resolving data-flow and queue failures. - Perform deeper diagnostics, including log analysis, configuration review and data validation. - Manage application configuration and master-data activities (item, price, promotion, customer and loyalty data). Root Cause Analysis & Problem Management - Lead structured root cause analysis for major and recurring incidents, and drive permanent fixes. - Raise, track and escalate defects with software vendors and implementation partners until closure, and hold vendors to agreed SLAs. - Maintain the problem register, known-error database and knowledge base, and write SOPs and runbooks. Release, Testing & Operational Acceptance - Support release, regression and smoke testing for SAP and retail applications, including UAT coordination with business users. - Own operational acceptance of new features and changes: confirm supportability, monitoring, documentation and handover readiness before go-live. - Take part in change management and CAB, assessing risk and impact of planned changes, and lead post-deployment validation and hypercare. Governance & Continuous Improvement - Apply ITIL-aligned incident, problem, change and service request processes. - Identify automation and process improvements that reduce incident volume and resolution time. - Maintain clear technical and process documentation and support audit and compliance requests. Qualifications & Experience - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or a related field. - Experience in application support or IT operations, including at least 4 years in a lead or senior L2/L3 role. - Hands-on experience supporting SAP applications in a production environment. - Proven experience leading incident response for P1/P2 issues and running root cause analysis. - Experience with log analysis, configuration management and master-data support. - Experience with release, regression and UAT testing. - Experience managing vendors and escalating product defects. - Strong working knowledge of ITSM tools (for example ServiceNow or Jira). - Excellent communication skills in English, with the ability to explain technical issues to non-technical stakeholders. Preferred - ITIL Foundation certification (ITIL 4 preferred). - Experience supporting retail applications: POS, BOS, loyalty, omnichannel, mobile and e-commerce platforms. - SAP Retail, SAP CAR, Dynamics 365 Commerce or similar retail platform experience. - Vendor or product certifications (SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce or equivalent). - Working knowledge of SQL, monitoring tools and API testing tools