Application Support Engineer II

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. 

• Propose Application Improvement Candidates. Continuously seek opportunities to suggest application enhancements aimed at reducing the volume of user support tickets and improving customer experience within the applications. 

• Monitor the health of the applications. When performance degradation is detected, take corrective actions, which may involve coordinating with teams such as Major Incident Management and the Application Development Teams. Tasks could include restarting servers or clearing messaging queues. This requires strong troubleshooting skills and a comprehensive understanding of both the application and infrastructure landscapes. The ability to effectively collaborate with technical teams (such as application development, network, database, and cloud operations) and guide them toward issue resolution is essential. In the event of application outages, managing ad hoc user communications is required. 

• Prepare to transition application support from the Development Teams. Our team is frequently asked to onboard new applications that we will support going forward. For each onboarding effort, dedicated time is allocated for knowledge transfer from the current support teams. You will be expected to listen carefully, understand the information shared, document key learnings, and apply that knowledge effectively in your day-to-day responsibilities.

• As an Application Support Engineer, you will serve as a role model and mentor for other team members. The team will rely on you to manage more complex incidents and lead support for more complex applications. You may also be assigned occasional project work by the Regional Lead.

About You

• Our company has a hybrid work model where the expectation is that you will be in the office at least three days per week.

• Fluency in spoken and written English is required.

• A four-year college degree or equivalent is preferred.

• Minimum of 5 years of professional experience in an equivalent position

• Good communication and presentation skills, with the ability to explain issues clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Strong customer and interpersonal relationship skills. 

• Knowledge of commercial insurance is advantageous. 

• Show the ability and passion to work in a global and multicultural environment, and to be able to work in a hybrid style.

• Ability to work both independently, proactively and collaboratively within a team.

• A team player, willing to contribute actively to the overall team spirit

• Organizational skills and effective workload management, even under tight deadlines, are required.

• Proactive attitude, willingness to assist others, and contribution to team success are valued.

• Excellent customer service and interpersonal abilities are needed.

• Shows initiative in seeking new knowledge and responsibilities, questions existing processes, and suggests improvements. 

• Demonstrates strong business awareness and a basic grasp of how IT initiatives drive organizational objectives. Proactively learns about end-to-end business processes and the priorities of internal teams, leveraging this insight to represent user interests and facilitate effective problem resolution.

• Technical aptitude and mindset: 

• Understands fundamentals of software development (i.e. programming, database, network, etc) though no programming will be required in the role.

• Must be willing to learn specific technical skills (i.e. server restarts, clearing queues) that will allow for resolution of major issues.

• Ability to identify root causes of issues in a cloud-based environment is a plus.

• Has experience with Monitoring & Observability

• Has experience with Technical Troubleshooting

• Technical Operations backgrounds

• Understanding FastAPI, REST APIs, Open API 

• Willingness to learn technical skills is a plus.

• Interest or background in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its practical application to support functions is desirable.

**Please send the resumes in English

Swiss Re is one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance, insurance and other forms of insurance-based risk transfer, working to make the world more resilient. We anticipate and manage a wide variety of risks, from natural catastrophes and climate change to cybercrime. Combining experience with creative thinking and cutting-edge expertise, we create new opportunities and solutions for our clients. This is possible thanks to the collaboration of more than 15,000 employees across the world.

Our success depends on our ability to build an inclusive culture encouraging fresh perspectives and innovative thinking. We embrace a workplace where everyone has equal opportunities to thrive and develop professionally regardless of their age, gender, race, ethnicity, gender identity and/or expression, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability, skillset, thought or other characteristics. In our inclusive and flexible environment everyone can bring their authentic selves to work and their passion for sustainability.

If you are an experienced professional returning to the workforce after a career break, we encourage you to apply for open positions that match your skills and experience.

We may use AI-powered tools to support the review and evaluation of applications for this position. These tools provide additional insights to our recruitment teams, but all hiring decisions are carefully reviewed and made by people. To learn more about how we use AI in recruitment and how we handle your personal data, please review our Data Privacy Statement before applying.