Manager, Application Support

Crown Castle; Houston (TX); Hybrid; USD 129,000 - 178,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare plans

401(k) plan with match

New-child leave (family leave)

Tuition reimbursement

Crown Castle scholarship program

Charitable matching

Paid time off

Holidays & floating holiday

Snacks & beverages

Job summary

Crown Castle is seeking a Manager, Application Support to lead a team delivering reliable support for ERP and real estate management platforms, including Sitetracker and ServiceNow. You will partner with IT and business stakeholders to improve service quality, automation, and incident management.

The role focuses on building program-level reliability, defining metrics, and coordinating with MSPs and vendors to ensure scalable, stable operations across on-prem, cloud, and SaaS environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in CS, engineering, or related field.
• 7+ years in application support, IT operations, software engineering, or SRE.
• 5+ years leading application support teams.
• 3+ years in a cloud environment, preferably AWS.
• Experience with Splunk, DataDog, Grafana, PagerDuty, Dynamics.
• Strong scripting: Python, PowerShell, JSON.
• Experience with automation, orchestration, integrations, monitoring.
• Experience with Kubernetes/EKS.

Responsibilities

• Lead day-to-day production support for enterprise apps ensuring reliability and timely incident response.
• Define and drive the support strategy, operating model, and reliability practices for critical apps.
• Ensure quality of infrastructure and app stack with testing practices and observability tools.
• Drive AIOps and automation initiatives to speed incident resolution.
• Manage incident, problem, change processes for tier 1 & 2 apps and prevent recurrence.
• Oversee intake, backlog, trends, and planned work with stakeholders.
• Mentor teammates to develop tech and leadership skills.
• Identify core process improvements and root cause impacts across teams.

Skills

Team leadership

Stakeholder engagement

Incident management

Automation advocacy

Cloud (AWS)

SRE / site reliability

Python scripting

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in CS/Engineering

Master’s degree preferred

Cloud, ITSM certification preferred

Tools

Splunk

DataDog

Grafana

PagerDuty

Dynamics

Kubernetes

EKS

Job description

For more than three decades, Crown Castle has led the way in shared communications infrastructure, delivering profitable solutions by connecting communities, businesses, and people, and enabling each to thrive with reliable access to voice and data in more places, faster than ever before. When you join Crown Castle, you become part of a dynamic team of passionate and collaborative professionals engaging in complex challenges and contributing to projects that shape the future of life and work.

About The Role

As the Manager, Application Support, you will lead the team responsible for supporting Crown Castle’s business and enterprise applications, including ERP, real estate management platforms such as Sitetracker, ServiceNow, and other critical systems and integrations between systems. This role is accountable for improving application reliability, strengthening support operations, and partnering with business and IT stakeholders to ensure these platforms enable efficient, stable, and scalable business processes.

What You Will Do

You will lead a team focused on delivering reliable application support services to Crown Castle’s business and IT users. You will manage the end-to-end Application Support function, including managed service providers that deliver specialized application support. You will establish operational metrics and reporting to measure performance, identify continuous improvement opportunities, and deliver actionable insights that improve business outcomes through automation, process discipline, and service reliability.

• Lead the day-to-day direction and execution of the team responsible for production support of Crown Castle’s enterprise and business applications, ensuring application reliability, timely incident response, effective issue resolution, and stable service delivery across the enterprise
• Define and lead the application support service strategy, operating model, and reliability practices for critical business and enterprise applications
• Ensure the quality and reliability of the infrastructure and application stack through defining rigorous testing practices, and use of observability tools
• Drive implementation of AIOps solutions that enable the organization to quickly identify, address, and resolve production incidents
• Use and enhance incident, problem, and change management processes for Crown Castle’s tier 1 and tier 2 applications, ensuring issues are prioritized, communicated, resolved, and prevented from recurring
• Guide daily application support delivery activities, including intake prioritization, backlog management, service request trends, incident review, and coordination of planned work with business and IT stakeholders
• Be an automation advocate – remove operational load with software
• Build a framework for implementation of automation and orchestration for manual processes required to operate services
• Partner with leaders to define, monitor, and improve SLAs, KPIs, SLOs, SLIs, and service quality metrics for production and non-production business applications, including on-premises, cloud, and SaaS platforms
• Create effective partnerships with managed service providers, software vendors, and third-party partners to improve application support, service quality, issue resolution, and IT service transformation
• Mentor and develop teammates to help them grow their technical and leadership skills
• Identify core problems or opportunities within business processes. Understands the root cause and impacts for the project and other teams

What You Will Need To Succeed

Education/Certifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field
• Master’s degree preferred
• Cloud, ITSM, application support, or service management certification preferred

Experience/Minimum Requirements

• Experience supporting business and enterprise applications such as ERP platforms, real estate management systems, ITSM platforms, workflow applications, or other mission-critical SaaS and on-premises business systems
• 7+ years of experience in application support, IT operations, software engineering, or site reliability engineering, with a focus on supporting critical business applications and improving operational reliability
• 5+ years of experience leading technical or application support teams, with a proven track record of improving application reliability, service delivery, stakeholder engagement, and operational performance
• 3+ years of experience in a cloud environment, preferably AWS
• Experience with industry standard tools such as Splunk, DataDog, Grafana, Pager Duty, Dynamics etc.
• Extensive experience with scripting and programming languages such as Python, PowerShell, and JSON
• Hands-on experience improving support processes through automation, orchestration, integrations, monitoring, workflow design, or cloud-native services
• Experienced with containerization technologies and orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes, EKS, and Faregate
• Experienced broad subject matter expertise across large scale distributed systems, container and container orchestration, monitoring and observability tooling, and the software development lifecycle
• Excellent technical problem-solving skills and the ability to quickly learn new technologies and tools
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and manage multiple priorities
• Demonstrated ability to understand complex, multi-project environments and diagnose risks and issues
• Project planning and organization skills, including the ability to identify and build project plans and goals that align with organizational objectives

Expectations

• Effectively influence and interact with leaders across the organization
• Encourages team to develop solutions that solve strategic problems related to the teams work and place in the value chain
• Coach others on how to present themselves and their ideas in a manner that builds credibility and respect
• Supervises, coordinates, provides leadership to and reviews the work of professional employees to accomplish operational plans and results
• Maintains an awareness of changing organizational conditions and their impact to the strategic objectives, using knowledge to adapt and evolve their approach.
• Builds belonging within the team by helping others and encouraging immediate teammates to work collaboratively
• Take primary responsibility for relationships with product & business stakeholders within and across teams to better plan for and prioritize work

Organizational Relationship

Reports to: Director Platform & Cloud Engineering

Title(s) of direct reports (if applicable): 4-5 software engineers and MSP vendor resources

Where You Will Work

To optimize collaboration, relationship building, and key stakeholder engagement, this role aligns to a 4:1 hybrid model which is in our Canonsburg or Houston office Monday-Thursday with the option for remote work on Fridays.

Your Company Benefits

At Crown Castle, we do our best to ensure you have access to the resources you need to live a healthy and happy life no matter where you are in life. Our benefits are built around your individual needs, covering physical, mental, and financial health and designed to enhance your quality of life.

We are proud to offer a full suite of health and wealth benefits for you and your loved ones. Below are a few of the key highlights of the many benefits we provide.

• Comprehensive healthcare plans with highly company subsidized premiums and up to $2,000 annual company contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA base plan for employee and dependents).
• Market-leading 401(k) plan, which includes up to 10% company contributions through our 5% match and 5% profit sharing program (based on employee contributions).
• New-child leave up to 8 weeks of 100% paid leave upon birth or legal adoption of a new child. Birth mothers are eligible for up to 8 weeks of additional 100% paid medical leave.
• Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250 per year of eligible tuition and fees.
• Crown Castle scholarship program awarding up to $10,000 per recipient each year for eligible dependent children of employees and interns.
• Matching charitable contributions to qualified charitable organizations of up to $1,000 per year per teammate.
• Generous paid time-off for eligible full-time employees (minimum 18 days per year based on years of service).
• 10 company holidays plus 2 floating holiday.
• All offices provide free beverages and snacks.

Compensation

The salary range offered for this position is $129,000-$177,500 annually. A candidate's offer is determined by various factors including but not limited to, depth of experience, role-related knowledge and skills, relevant education or training, internal alignment, and work location. Depending on the position offered, the compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of a discretionary annual cash bonus or commissions, and equity incentives.

Additional Information

Pursuant to the Los Angeles County and San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.