Manager, Application Support

Position Overview      

The Application Support Manager leads the team responsible for the health and support of Richardson Wealth’s business applications. The role oversees complex application support, incidents, escalations, operational readiness, service performance, and vendor support. The Manager actively participates in incident triage and prioritization, presents service health, risks, and recommendations to executive stakeholders, and demonstrates strong written and verbal communication skills. Tier 2 owns technical diagnosis and service restoration, while permanent changes are transitioned to the appropriate delivery, data, infrastructure, security, or vendor team. The Manager also develops team capability and uses knowledge, automation, and AI responsibly to improve service quality and efficiency.

This is an existing vacancy

Duties and Responsibilities

• People Leadership & Capability: Lead, coach, and develop Tier 2 analysts and specialists; set clear accountabilities, establish coverage and succession plans, manage performance, and build cross-platform expertise.

• Production Service Health & Supportability: Own the operational health, stability, and supportability of assigned applications, integrations, batch processes, data feeds, and operational services. Use monitoring, observability, alerting, logs, and service telemetry to identify risks, service degradation, and emerging issues proactively.

• Incident Management: Ensure complex incidents are triaged, prioritized, investigated, resolved, documented, and communicated in accordance with agreed service-management practices and business-impact considerations. Coordinate root cause analysis (RCA) for significant or recurring incidents, ensuring corrective actions are assigned, tracked, and completed.

• Escalation Management: Lead the response to complex and high-impact issues by engaging and escalating to the appropriate vendors and internal teams. Ensure clear ownership, timely updates, effective hand-offs, and follow-through until service is restored and required corrective actions are completed.

• Operational Readiness: Assess the supportability of releases and production changes, confirming that monitoring, runbooks, support procedures, access, rollback plans, vendor contacts, knowledge transfer, and hypercare arrangements are in place before transition to operations. Delivery owns release content and implementation readiness; Tier 2 confirms operational readiness and ongoing supportability.

• Service Performance & Reporting: Establish and report meaningful service measures such as ticket ageing, priority trends, service-level performance, repeat incidents, backlog health, root-cause actions, vendor performance, and knowledge effectiveness. Use insights to drive decisions and continuous improvement.

• Knowledge Management & Shift Left: Build and maintain runbooks, known-error records, support procedures, and troubleshooting guidance. Partner with Business Support to move repeatable work to the lowest appropriate support level without transferring unresolved technical debt.

• Vendor & Third-Party Support: Manage operational support relationships with vendors, including case escalation, service reviews, defect follow-up, release impact, support obligations, and resolution of recurring service issues.

• Risk, Controls & Compliance: Ensure support activities follow change, security, privacy, access, audit, record-keeping, and regulatory control requirements appropriate to a wealth-management environment. Escalate material operational risks and control gaps.

• Operational Excellence, Automation & AI: Identify opportunities to improve support through automation, AI-assisted diagnostics, event correlation, ticket enrichment, knowledge retrieval, monitoring, recurring-task reduction, and reporting. Promote responsible use of AI with appropriate human oversight, data protection, validation, auditability, and control.

• Work Planning & Capacity: Balance reactive support, planned operational work, release support, problem remediation, and team development. Forecast capacity and raise trade-offs early when service resilience or delivery commitments are at risk.

• Business & Stakeholder Partnership: Build productive relationships with business, operations, compliance, delivery, and technology stakeholders; communicate clearly during incidents and provide transparent service-health, risk, and improvement updates.

• On-Call Support: Participate in and coordinate after-hours or weekend support when required for critical incidents, production releases, and time-sensitive operational activities.

Qualifications              

• Post-secondary degree or diploma in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

• 7+ years of experience in support, production operations, service management, or a related technology field, including at least three years in a people-leadership or team-lead role.

• Experience leading complex incidents, technical escalations, root cause analysis, corrective actions, and service improvements, supported by strong knowledge of ITIL-aligned service-management practices. ITIL certification is an asset.

• Strong technical knowledge of integrated enterprise application environments, including APIs, data feeds, batch processes, identity and access, databases, cloud or hosted services, and third-party platforms.

• Experience supporting operational readiness and production transitions, including monitoring, runbooks, rollback and hypercare planning, vendor coordination, and adherence to security, privacy, audit, resilience, and production-control requirements.

• Experience working in Agile delivery environments and collaborating with cross-functional teams on release planning, operational readiness, and continuous improvement.

• Strong people-management skills, including coaching, performance management, succession planning, and developing technical talent.

• Strong analytical and decision-making skills, with the ability to identify root causes, assess business impact, challenge incomplete information, and make risk-based recommendations.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to deliver concise incident updates and explain technical issues, risks, and trade-offs to business and executive stakeholders.

• Experience in wealth management, financial services, or another regulated industry is strongly preferred.

• Ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment while maintaining accountability, sound judgement, customer focus, and attention to detail.

• Bilingual proficiency in English and French is an asset.