Application Support Lead (SAP & Retail)

Confidential Careers; Abu Dhabi; On-site; AED 420,000 - 660,000; Full time

Job summary

Confidential Careers in the UAE seeks an experienced IT Application Support Lead to mentor L1/L2 teams, act as escalation point for P1/P2 incidents, and own SLA/KPI reporting. The role covers SAP and retail apps, integrations, and data/master-data management, with emphasis on root-cause analysis and vendor coordination.

You will drive incident response, oversee releases, and contribute to governance and continuous improvement within an ITIL-aligned environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or 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 (ServiceNow or Jira).
• Excellent communication skills in English, with the ability to explain technical issues to non-technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor the application support team (L1/L2), setting priorities and coaching engineers.
• Act as escalation point for high-severity incidents and coordinate cross-team response.
• Own SLA and KPI performance and report incident trends and volumes.
• Lead support for SAP and retail applications including POS/BOS, web, mobile and loyalty platforms.
• Monitor integrations and interfaces (IDocs, middleware, APIs, EDI) and resolve data-flow issues.
• Perform deep diagnostics including log analysis and data validation.
• Manage master-data activities (item, price, promotion, customer, loyalty).
• Lead structured root cause analysis and drive permanent fixes.
• Support release testing and UAT coordination; ensure go-live readiness.
• Apply ITIL-aligned incident, problem, change and service request processes.
• Identify automation and process improvements to reduce incidents.

Skills

Leadership

Incident management

Log analysis

Vendor management

Troubleshooting

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

SAP

POS/BOS

ServiceNow

Jira

SQL

API testing tools

Job description

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 escalat**e** 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