Senior Support Engineer

Lead Level 3 support for critical digital services, ensuring high availability, fast incident recovery, and long-term resilience. Drive root cause elimination, design supportable architectures, oversee major changes, and mentor support teams. Ensure alignment with DDaT, DevOps, and Home Office service expectations. Key Outcomes & Responsibilities

• Major Incident Leadership: Act as technical lead for P1/P2 incidents, coordinating recovery and communication.
• Root Cause Ownership: Lead formal RCAs, define corrective actions, and ensure follow-through via sprints/releases.
• Change & Release Governance: Review technical change plans, lead high-risk deployments, and support hotfix releases.
• Availability & Performance: Improve reliability through proactive monitoring, self-healing automation, and architectural enhancements.
• Environment Strategy: Maintain stable non-production environments and collaborate with environment management teams.
• Service Performance: Drive SLA achievement, service reviews, metrics analysis, and proactive improvements.
• Shift Left & Knowledge Management: Develop high-quality runbooks, automate manual tasks, and train L1/L2 teams.
• Transition Support: Provide documentation, KT, and pairing during onboarding/offboarding of support teams.
• Technical Leadership: Mentor engineers and collaborate with product, DevOps, and development teams.

Essential Skills (Must Have)

• Deep expertise in distributed systems, Java, Javascript, microservices, APIs, and cloud platforms.
• Strong debugging skills using logs, metrics, traces, and profiling tools.
• Experience with CI/CD tooling and release management.
• Strong scripting and automation capabilities.
• Ability to lead technical bridges under pressure

Desirable Skills (Nice to Have)

• Advanced cloud knowledge (AWS professional level).
• Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS, AKS).
• Knowledge of reliability engineering practices (SRE).
• Experience improving infrastructure via IaC.
• Ability to contribute to architecture decisions.

Experience Profile

• 5-10+ years in Level 3 support, DevOps engineering, or SRE roles.
• Significant experience managing critical systems with high availability requirements.
• Proven leadership in major incidents and change governance.

Ways of Working

• Operates within Agile product teams with DevOps principles.
• Leads service reviews, problem boards, and continual improvement cycles.
• Coaches and mentors engineering teams.

Location & Security UK-based, hybrid working as agreed with Client; SC eligibility is required Certification (Preferred)

• AWS/Azure Professional
• SRE or DevOps Practitioner Certifications

The Cognizant community: We are a high caliber team who appreciate and support one another. Our people uphold an energetic, collaborative and inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive. * Cognizant is a global community with more than 300,000 associates around the world. * We don't just dream of a better way - we make it happen. * We take care of our people, clients, company, communities and climate by doing what's right. * We foster an innovative environment where you can build the career path that's right for you., Cognizant is one of the world's leading professional services companies, transforming clients' business, operating, and technology models for the digital era. Our unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses. Headquartered in the U.S., Cognizant (a member of the NASDAQ-100 and one of Forbes World's Best Employers 2025) is consistently listed among the most admired companies in the world. Learn how Cognizant helps clients lead with digital at www.cognizant.com