Senior Application Support Engineer

Aberdeen Standard Investments; City of Edinburgh; Hybrid; GBP 65,000 - 85,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading financial services company in Edinburgh is looking for a Senior Application Support Engineer to enhance and support critical investment application systems. The role involves leading a team, ensuring stability and performance of applications, and managing incidents across global time zones. Ideal candidates will have strong SQL skills and experience in supporting applications in a financial context. This position offers competitive benefits and a flexible working approach.

Benefits

40 days' annual leave

16% employer pension contribution

Private healthcare

Gym discounts

Qualifications

• Several years of experience in senior application support.
• Strong experience with SQL for querying and performance tuning.
• Experience in Financial Services preferred.

Responsibilities

• Lead support and maintenance of applications for Asset Management.
• Drive incident management and root cause analysis.
• Develop and maintain application code.

Skills

SQL

Problem-solving skills

Communication

Collaboration

Analytical skills

Tools

Windows

DevOps tools

Autosys

IBM MQ

Azure

Job description

Job Description

At Aberdeen, our ambition is to be the UK’s leading Wealth & Investments group.

Strengthening talent and culture is one of our strategic priorities. We strive to make Aberdeen a great place to work so that we can attract and retain the industry’s best talent.

Our people put our stakeholders at the heart of everything they do by helping us to make a positive difference to the lives of our clients, customers, colleagues, shareholders, and society.

We are focused on growing our direct and advised wealth platforms and repositioning our specialist asset management business to meet client demand. We are committed to providing excellent client service, supported by leading technology and talent.

Aberdeen comprises three businesses, interactive investor (ii), Investments, and Adviser, each of which focuses on meeting and adapting to our clients’ evolving needs:

• interactive investor, the UK’s second largest direct-to-consumer investment platform, enables individuals in the UK to plan, save, and invest in the way that works for them.
• Our Adviser business provides financial planning solutions and technology for UK financial advisers, enabling them to create value for their customers.
• Our Investments business is a specialist asset manager that focuses on areas where we have both strength and scale to capitalise on the key themes shaping the market, through either public markets or alternative asset classes.

About the Role & Department

We are seeking an experienced Senior Application Support Engineer to join our Asset Management Technology team. This role is focused on supporting and enhancing our investment application systems which are critical components of our investment business. This includes support for real time trading as well as our multi slot investment batch applications. Batch and application support operates across APAC, EMEA and AMRS. As an experienced engineer, you’ll work in a team of support engineers, working across a range of technologies, to a global delivery schedule, to ensure the stability, performance, and continuous improvement of our applications and data flows. Due to our global delivery schedule, flexibility to work on-call and a variety of shift patterns will be essential.

In Investments Technology, our Asset Management Tribe supports the products and processes employed by our asset management business. The tribe comprises a number of squads who are responsible for developing, maintaining and supporting the critical suite of applications and technologies.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the support and maintenance of our multi-slot batch and applications which serve our global Asset Management business ensuring stability, performance, and availability across global regions.
• Drive incident and problem management, leading recovery efforts across global time zones driving root cause analysis, debugging failures, applying fixes and participation in post-incident reviews.
• Act as a technical escalation point for complex application issues, providing guidance and mentoring to more junior application support engineers.
• Develop, test and maintain application code, contributing to sprint activities as part of our application lifecycle management.
• Work seamlessly with service partners to ensure robust service levels are maintained.
• Collaborate with infrastructure specialists to implement fixes and enhancements and participate in scheduled Disaster Recovery proving events during scheduled maintenance windows.
• Support scheduled release and deployment activities, including validation, rollback planning, and post-deployment monitoring.
• Using support and application expertise, evaluate infrastructure, system and third party changes for service impact to the supported application services.
• Champion best practices in application monitoring and proactive issue detection.
• Produce and maintain technical documentation to support our production services.
• Identify opportunities for automation and continuous improvement, enhancing support efficiency and reducing manual effort.
• Flexible to work different shift patterns / be on an on-call rota

About the Candidate

The ideal candidate will possess the following:

• A number of years’ experience working in a senior application support and maintenance role leading a team of support engineers.
• Strong proficiency and experience working with SQL for data querying, processing and performance tuning.
• Familiarity with Financial Services, preferably trading and the ability to ensure compliance throughout.
• Experience of data warehousing, ELT/ETL processes, and data modelling.
• Experience using scheduling tools and in supporting applications running on Windows.
• A proactive mindset with a focus on service and customer impact.
• Performs consistently in time-sensitive and complex scenarios.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Experience supporting team members, sharing knowledge, and fostering a collaborative support culture.
• Excellent communication and collaboration abilities.
• Ability to work independently and within cross-functional teams using agile development.

Desirable Skills

• Exposure to DevOps practices and tools (CI/CD, automation).
• Familiarity with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Fabric.
• Knowledge of Cloud-native development: Azure, Snowflake, ADF (Azure Data Factory) and DBT (Data Build Tool) for modular SQL development.
• Autosys scheduling and Ab Initio for ETL and batch processing as well as Markit EDM.
• MQ (IBM MQ, ACE) for message-based integrations.

We are proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer. If you have a disability and would like to apply to one of our UK roles under the Disability Confident Scheme, please notify us by completing the relevant section in our candidate questionnaire. One of our team will reach out to support you through your application process.

Our benefits

There's more to working life than coming home with a good salary. We have an environment where you can learn, get involved and be supported.

When you join us, your reward will be one of the best around. This includes 40 days’ annual leave, a 16% employer pension contribution, a discretionary performance-based bonus (where applicable), private healthcare and a range of flexible benefits – including gym discounts, season ticket loans and access to an employee discount portal. You can read more about our benefits here.

Our business

Enabling our clients to be better investors drives everything we do. Our business is structured around three distinct areas – our vectors of growth – focused on our clients’ changing needs. You can find out more about what we do here.

An inclusive way of working

Whatever way you like to work, if you have the talent and commitment to join our team, we’d like to hear from you.

At Aberdeen we’ve adopted a ‘blended working’ approach. This approach combines the benefits of face-to-face collaboration, coaching and connecting in our offices with the flexibility of working from home. It enables colleagues to find a balance that works for their roles, their teams, our clients and our business.

An inclusive culture, where diverse perspectives drive our actions, is at the core of who we are and what we do. If you need assistance with your application, or a reasonable adjustment to your interview arrangements – for example, because you are neurodivergent, or have a physical, sensory, cognitive, mental, visible or invisible disability – please let us know and we’ll be happy to help.

We’re committed to providing an inclusive workplace where all forms of difference are valued and which is free from any form of unfair or unlawful treatment. We define diversity in its broadest sense – this includes but is not limited to our diversity of educational and professional backgrounds, experience, cognitive and neurodiversity, age, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, religion or belief and ethnicity and geographical provenance. We support a culture that values meritocracy, fairness and transparency and welcomes enquiries from everyone. If you need assistance or an adjustment due to a disability please let us know as part of your application and we will assist.