Application Infrastructure Management Engineer / SME

Role purpose

Provide application infrastructure expertise for business-critical applications, helping application owners, development teams, infrastructure teams and vendors understand how applications are hosted, integrated, monitored, recovered and operated. The role combines application knowledge, infrastructure understanding and architecture judgement to improve supportability, resilience and operational maturity.

Key responsibilities

• Assess application hosting environments, dependencies, interfaces and infrastructure components.
• Review application supportability across operating system, database, middleware, application server, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery and operational documentation.
• Identify operational gaps, technical risks, lifecycle issues and improvement opportunities.
• Work with application owners, development teams, infrastructure towers and vendors to define or refine the operating model.
• Provide specialist input for application infrastructure, monitoring concepts, resilience, recovery, lifecycle and modernization discussions.
• Support managed service takeover for applications by validating supportability, required documentation, working instructions and service readiness.
• Help application teams move toward more standard, supportable and modern operating patterns where appropriate.
• Act as a trusted advisor to application owners by building knowledge of the application, business context, dependencies and operational sensitivities.
• Support critical incident reviews where application infrastructure, middleware, platform or dependency knowledge is required.

Required experience

• Senior experience in application infrastructure, application operations, middleware, production engineering, application support or solution architecture.
• Strong understanding of how enterprise applications run across datacenter, virtualized, middleware, database, container and cloud environments.
• Experience evaluating legacy, non-standard and modern application stacks.
• Practical knowledge of application servers and middleware such as WebSphere, Tomcat, IIS, message queueing, Java, .NET, APIs and container-based platforms.
• Experience with operational readiness, dependency mapping, monitoring design, resilience, recovery planning and incident analysis.
• Ability to translate between application teams and infrastructure teams.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with application owners, developers, vendors and infrastructure operations teams.

Useful additional skills

• Experience in manufacturing, plant, logistics or other business-critical environments.
• Experience with application performance monitoring, observability, monitoring, IT service management and DevOps tooling.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, automation and infrastructure-as-code.
• German language capability useful for German plant-facing or operations-facing discussions.

Candidate profile

This is a hybrid application infrastructure and application SME role. The ideal candidate is not a pure infrastructure architect and not a pure developer. They should understand how applications behave in production, how infrastructure affects application stability, and how to build confidence with application owners over time.