Associate Director - Application Support Engineering

FC Global Services India LLP (First Citizens India), a part of First Citizens BancShares, Inc., a top 20 U.S. financial institution, is a global capability center (GCC) based in Bengaluru. Our India-based teams benefit from the company’s over 125-year legacy of strength and stability. First Citizens India is responsible for delivering value and managing risks for our lines of business. We are particularly proud of our strong, relationship-driven culture and our long-term approach, which are deeply ingrained in our talented workforce. This is evident across all key areas of our operations, including Technology, Enterprise Operations, Finance, Cybersecurity, Risk Management, and Credit Administration. We are seeking talented individuals to join us in our mission of providing solutions fit for our clients’ greatest ambitions.

Job Description:

Job Description

Value Proposition

Responsible for the operational reliability, availability, performance, and resilience of the bank's business-critical applications and technology platforms.

Responsible for managing Production Support, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Infrastructure Operations, Incident Management, Problem Management, and Continuous Service Improvement while ensuring compliance with banking regulations, security standards, and operational risk frameworks.

Defining support strategy, ensuring application stability and performance, and collaborating with other stakeholders to align technology with business objectives.

Job Details

Position Title: Associate Director Application Support Engineering

Career Level: L3

Job Category: Vice President

Role Type: Hybrid

Job Location: Bangalore

About the Team:

As part of Global command center team, we are responsible for supporting most complex business critical infrastructure & application teams with measurably requiring integration across functions with broad impact on business processes, delivering quality support to users.

Key Deliverables

IT & Business Strategy: Partners with senior management to develop and implement IT strategies aligned with the company's business goal's and objectives. Establishes and monitors expectations to achieve company and department goals.

Platform & Application Support: Enhance performance, reliability, availability and observability of the various banking platforms and improve End-User experience. Applies broad knowledge of process/service capabilities to identify new risk areas, new process updates to evaluate & improve the efficiency of business processes with User/Client & transaction journey to maximize speed and quality

Infrastructure Operations & Support: Oversee the operational support, stability, availability, and performance of enterprise infrastructure and technology platforms, including:Windows and Linux Server Platforms

Cloud Platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP)

Virtualization and Container Platforms

Databases (Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Netezza, MySQL)

Middleware and Integration Services

Storage and Backup Solutions

Network Operations, Core Infrastructure Services, and Voice Platforms

Ensure platform reliability, capacity planning, operational readiness, high availability, and disaster recovery preparedness across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.

Ensure infrastructure capacity planning and lifecycle management. Maintain high availability architecture and disaster recovery readiness.

Technical Expertise: Lead the support and operational stability of complex, business-critical applications and technology platforms with significant business impact. Provide hands-on technical leadership for troubleshooting, incident resolution, and service restoration across application, infrastructure, cloud, and network environments. Act as the Incident Commander for major incidents, leading bridge calls and coordinating recovery efforts across internal and vendor teams. Drive automation, observability, and reliability engineering practices to enhance platform stability and operational resilience. Leverage Infrastructure monitoring (SolarWinds) and APM tools such as Dynatrace to proactively identify issues and improve service performance.

Team Leadership: Lead and develop multidisciplinary teams across Application Support, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Infrastructure Operations, and Major Incident Management. Build a high-performing organization through coaching, succession planning, and talent development. Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, collaboration, continuous improvement, and operational excellence while driving service reliability and business outcomes.

Vendor Management - Own vendor performance management, service level commitments, contract renewals, and third-party risk governance. Ensure vendors consistently meet agreed availability, reliability, recovery, and operational performance objectives while driving accountability and continuous service improvement.

Skills and Qualification

16+ years of experience leading teams within a 24x7 production support, operations, or reliability engineering environment.

Bachelor’s degree in engineering, MCA, Computer Science, or a related discipline.

Proven experience leading L1 and L2 Application Support, Infrastructure Operations, and Observability Engineering teams in large-scale, 24x7 enterprise environments.

Strong knowledge of JEE, enterprise technologies, microservices-based architecture and distributed applications.

Deep expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure) and on-premises infrastructure technologies, including virtualization, networking, storage, and compute platforms.

Experience managing and supporting hybrid environments leveraging Kubernetes, Container Platform, VMware and cloud-native technologies.

Demonstrated experience driving automation, observability, and AI-enabled operational capabilities to improve reliability and efficiency.

Strong technical knowledge of ServiceNow, Oracle, SQL, Dynatrace, and other monitoring and operational management tools.

Good understanding of ITIL, DevOps, Agile, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices.

Experience in Financial Services, Banking, Large Financial Institutions, or similarly complex regulated environments is preferred.

Strong expertise in Incident, Major Incident, Problem, Change and Request Management processes.

Excellent stakeholder management, collaboration, communication, ownership, and accountability skills.

Leadership Qualities

Communication: Clearly conveys ideas and listens actively.

Inspiration: Motivates and encourages the team to achieve their best.

Influence: Extensive stakeholder management experience and ability to influence people

Driving strategic and technical initiatives

Relationships & Collaboration

Reports to: Director – Technology

Partners: Senior leaders and cross-functional teams across geographies (India and US team)

Accessibility Needs

We are committed to providing an inclusive and accessible hiring process. If you require accommodation at any stage (e.g. application, interviews, onboarding) please let us know, and we will work with you to ensure a seamless experience.

Equal Employment Opportunity

FC Global Services India LLP (First Citizens India) is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. We are committed to fostering an inclusive and accessible environment and prohibit all forms of discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, caste, disability, sexual orientation, economic status or any other characteristics protected by the law. We strive to foster a safe and respectful environment in which all individuals are treated with respect and dignity. Our EEO policy ensures fairness throughout the employee life cycle.