Application Support Engineer

About the Team 

This team provides second-level user support across a global environment. The Application Support Engineer primarily offers support to Swiss Re's Corporate Solutions business users, with a specific focus on North America, while also contributing to the overall support of a worldwide user community. The core responsibility of this team is to deliver exceptional service to internal customers by proactively monitoring and managing applications across all regions. This includes maximizing application availability, notifying internal customers of outages, escalating service-impacting issues when necessary, and restoring service as efficiently as possible—either independently or by involving the appropriate teams.  

Team members can develop deep functional expertise in the end-to-end processes and system landscape typical of a commercial insurance organization. As applications transition from the Development Teams, there is a chance to learn from the ground up. Over the years, the team has gradually integrated new applications, resulting in a dynamic application landscape and an evolving support function.  

The team operates in a highly collaborative, globally distributed environment. Individuals in this role report directly to the designated Regional Lead.  

About the Role 

• Provide support through Incident Management. This involves identifying, analyzing, and resolving incidents to prevent future occurrences. Incidents may arise from technical or functional issues and can disrupt business operations. As the users advocate, it is essential to listen to their concerns, understand their issues, and ensure resolution. Through this process, support engineers develop expertise in functional applications and business processes.  

• Demonstrate strong technical ability and analytical skills. Our application landscape is broad and includes multiple integrated applications, so you will need to understand how systems connect, where technical dependencies exist, and how issues in one area may impact another. For example, when a user reports an application error, you should be able to review logs, identify whether the issue is related to upstream or downstream dependencies, assess the business impact, and work with the appropriate teams to drive resolution. 

• Oversee Problem Management. This includes analyzing the root causes of problems and coordinating with other teams until the issue is fully resolved. Sometimes, a problem is identified as a collection of similar incidents, which is then assigned to the relevant application team for resolution. Even when users have been provided with a workaround, it remains the support engineer’s responsibility to advocate for complete resolution.  

• Interact with users and cross-functional teams. During Incident and Problem Management, support engineers are relied upon to ensure incidents are resolved. This often requires reaching out to other teams or users to gather the necessary information to fix issues. Communication is conducted through email, instant messaging, and phone calls. Successfully managing these interactions builds a valuable network of resources.