Job Title: Application Production Support Lead – SRE
Location: Vienna, VA (Onsite 3 Days a Week)
Work Arrangement: Hybrid – Local Virginia Candidates Only
Duration: 6+ Months Contract-to-Hire
Rate: $50/hr on C2C
Interview Mode: 1 Video Interview + 1 Face-to-Face Client Interview
Job Description:
IT Catalyst is seeking an experienced Application Production Support Lead with strong Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) experience to lead application production support operations and drive the transformation from a traditional incident-driven support model to a proactive, reliability-focused SRE approach.
The ideal candidate will have extensive experience supporting business-critical production applications, implementing SRE practices, improving application reliability, reducing production outages, and establishing proactive monitoring and incident prevention strategies.
This role will focus primarily on application reliability and production support rather than infrastructure engineering. The selected candidate will lead a team of approximately 8 professionals, develop an SRE adoption roadmap, and implement strategies to identify and resolve potential application issues before they impact business operations.
The candidate should have strong expertise in application performance monitoring, database response times, incident trends, troubleshooting, and root cause analysis. Experience with Microsoft Azure and financial services environments will be an added advantage.
Key Responsibilities:
Lead application production support operations and manage a team of approximately 8 professionals.
Drive the transformation of traditional production support operations into a proactive Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) model.
Develop and execute an SRE adoption roadmap, including reliability improvement initiatives and operational strategies.
Establish proactive monitoring, alerting, and application incident prevention mechanisms.
Monitor application performance metrics, service health, database response times, and incident trends.
Investigate application failures, performance degradation, recurring incidents, and production issues.
Lead incident management, problem management, root cause analysis (RCA), and preventive action planning.
Identify application reliability risks and implement corrective measures to reduce outages and recurring incidents.
Define and track operational KPIs to measure application health, reliability, availability, and production support effectiveness.
Improve application stability, operational efficiency, and overall service reliability.
Balance daily production support responsibilities with long-term SRE transformation initiatives.
Collaborate with application development, database, operations, and business teams to resolve critical production issues.
Communicate application health, incident trends, risks, and improvement initiatives to stakeholders.
Required Qualifications:
Minimum 7+ years of experience in Application Production Support.
Minimum 3+ years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or implementing SRE practices.
Strong experience supporting business-critical production applications.
Proven experience transforming traditional production support operations into proactive SRE-focused environments.
Experience developing SRE roadmaps and application reliability improvement strategies.
Strong knowledge of application monitoring, alerting, performance management, and production troubleshooting.
Hands-on experience investigating application failures, performance degradation, database response delays, and recurring production incidents.
Strong understanding of Incident Management, Problem Management, Root Cause Analysis (RCA), and preventive action planning.
Experience identifying application reliability risks and implementing outage-reduction strategies.
Experience defining and tracking application performance and operational reliability metrics.
Previous experience leading or coordinating production support teams.
Excellent communication, stakeholder management, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
Preferred Skills:
Experience with Microsoft Azure.
Experience supporting financial services or banking applications.
Experience driving SRE adoption and production support modernization initiatives.
