SPM Lead Application Operations Engineer

The Scottish Government; Glasgow; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Social Security Scotland is seeking a Lead Application Operations Engineer to join our Digital Services Branch, providing technical leadership and SME expertise for the Case Management System (Cúram) and batch processing services.

As the senior operational lead, you will drive incident triage and resolution across all priority levels, build capability within the team, and work with stakeholders to ensure reliable service delivery and improved operational performance.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on application support experience.
• Proven technical leadership across complex, business-critical services.
• Experience leading teams delivering critical government services.

Responsibilities

• Lead incident triage and resolution across priority levels to ensure service availability.
• Drive improvements in resilience, monitoring, alerting and maintenance practices.
• Shape the future direction of Application Operations Engineering and mentor the team.

Skills

Application support

Technical leadership

Incident management

Team leadership

Tools

Cúram

Job description

Social Security Scotland is currently seeking a Lead Application Operations Engineer to join our Digital Services Branch, providing technical leadership and specialist expertise for our Case Management System (Cúram) and associated batch processing services.

As part of our Digital, Delivery and Change Division, you will lead a hybrid support team of in-house Application Operations Engineers and supplier System Business Analysts. Together, the team supports 17 benefit products delivered through the Case Management System, ensuring service availability, platform stability, integration processing, and the accurate generation of client payments.

As the senior operational lead and subject matter expert, you will drive incident triage and resolution across all priority levels, including complex and business-critical incidents. You will build and maintain technical capability within the team, lead problem resolution activities, and work closely with internal and external stakeholders to ensure reliable service delivery.

You will play a key role in improving service resilience, reliability and operational performance, while driving the maturity of monitoring, alerting, maintenance and support practices.

This is a highly visible leadership role with the opportunity to shape the future direction of Application Operations Engineering, influence team growth and capability, and drive continuous improvement across the wider profession.

We are looking for candidates with strong hands‑on application support experience, proven technical leadership skills, and a track record of leading teams that deliver critical business services.

A Lead Application Operations Engineer defines the application strategy and the strategy for security administration.

At this role level, you will:

• liaise with leads within IT operations on how applications are performing and changes that need to be put in place
• potentially manage and maintain certain aspects of an application (depending on the complexity and size of a project, and the likely impact it will have on the business)