Application Support Analyst (Level 1.5)

At Nava, we believe in the power of technology to transform businesses — and we have a challenging and strategic opportunity waiting for you.

Come grow with us!

Mission:

Monitor the availability and performance of critical applications and integrations, isolate the layer where the incident manifests, execute standardized verification and containment procedures, and escalate to the support team or the maintaining department with sufficient diagnosis and evidence to accelerate resolution.

Essential Knowledge:

Application Architecture

• Architectural models and their typical failure points: monolithic applications, three-tier architecture, microservices, and legacy applications.
• End-to-end request flow: client, load balancer, web server, application server, middleware, database — and the ability to identify at which point the request is failing.
• Concepts of session, cache, connection pools, and timeouts — and how each manifests as a symptom to the end user.
• Practical difference between total unavailability, performance degradation, and partial functional failure, which is decisive for correct severity classification.
• Segregated environments (production, staging, development) and the discipline of not confusing alerts from non-production environments with critical incidents.
• Concepts of high availability and load balancing: concept of a node off the load balancer, stuck sessions, and failover failures.

Web Servers and Application Servers

• Web servers: Apache HTTP Server, NGINX, and Microsoft IIS — status verification, reading access and error logs.
• Interpretation of HTTP status codes with diagnostic reasoning: distinguishing client errors (4xx) from server errors (5xx), and recognizing 502, 503, and 504 as typical symptoms of an unavailable, overloaded, or slow backend.
• Application servers: Apache Tomcat, JBoss/WildFly, WebLogic, or WebSphere depending on the environment — status verification, heap usage, and log reading.
• JVM concepts at the symptom level: OutOfMemoryError, excessive garbage collection, and stuck threads — without going into tuning.
• Digital certificates: identifying certificate expiration as a cause of unavailability — a recurring, predictable, and avoidable failure through monitoring.
• Concepts of reverse proxy and load balancer, with verification of active nodes and health checks.

Middleware and Integrations

• Concept of middleware as an integration layer and its failure modes: stopped queue, error message, disconnected connector, expired credentials.
• Queues and messaging: concept of queue, topic, dead letter queue, and message accumulation as a symptom of a stopped consumer.
• REST and SOAP APIs: reading responses, identifying authentication errors, payload errors, and timeouts; using endpoint testing tools for validation.
• Authentication and authorization in integrations: tokens, certificates, keys, and the failure pattern due to credential expiration.
• Batch processing: verifying execution, identifying stuck jobs or those outside the scheduled window, and the cascading impact on dependent systems.
• File transfer and file-based interfaces, still frequent in utility environments.

Observability Applied to Applications

• Dynatrace or equivalent at a reading level: transaction analysis, identification of degraded services, and navigation through dependency maps — a high-value competency for isolating layers.
• Splunk or equivalent for searching centralized logs and correlating events between components.
• Zabbix at a reading level for application items, triggers, and availability history.
• APM concepts: response time, error rate, throughput, and Apdex — vocabulary necessary to communicate degradation objectively.
• Temporal correlation between application events, infrastructure events, and recent changes — the first question in any application incident is: what changed?

Desirable:

• Completed higher education degree in IT or related fields.
• Prior experience supporting corporate applications in a mission-critical environment, preferably with SAP platforms.
• ITIL 4 Foundation certification.
• Certification or formal training in an observability tool (Dynatrace Associate, Splunk Core Certified User).
• SQL knowledge for verification queries guided by playbooks, complementing the work of the database analyst.
• Scripting knowledge for executing verification routines (PowerShell, Bash, or Python).
• Technical English for reading vendor documentation and opening tickets with suppliers.
• Experience in the electric sector or utilities, with an understanding of the regulatory impact of unavailability.

What is not expected from this position:

• Code debugging, deep stack trace analysis, or software defect correction.
• Deploy, rollback, or any changes in the production environment.
• JVM tuning, connection pool adjustment, heap sizing, or application server configuration.
• Creation or modification of integrations, endpoints, queues, or batch routines.
• Reprocessing of error messages or intervention in production queues without an approved playbook.
• Functional support to users regarding application business rules — this is the competency of the maintaining department.
• Renewal or installation of digital certificates — the position identifies expiration and escalates; replacement follows the change management process.

Interested? Apply for the position and take your technical interview with SophIA:

https://entrevista.starmindai.ai

Code: NAVA-SUPORTEN15