Director - Application Support and Site Reliability Engineering

S&P Global Mobility • Southfield, MI

2d

About The Position

Our business runs on the systems this team keeps stable. As Director Application Support and Site Reliability Engineering, you will lead a global team of 12 engineers responsible for the health of 50+ business-critical applications and the middleware that connects them, holding uptime targets of 99.9-99.95%.
Beyond keeping systems running, you will lead the modernization of how a large support organization operates: automating manual work, improving observability, consolidating platforms, and building a team that engineers reliability rather than just reacting to outages.
This role carries direct executive visibility, real influence over budget and vendor relationships, and a clear path to broader technology leadership.
What You Will Build
Modern observability and monitoring across 50+ applications and middleware platforms, cutting the time it takes to detect and resolve issues.
Automation that eliminates repetitive manual support work and frees the team for higher-value engineering.
A consolidated, simplified support model across applications, middleware, and third-party products, with fewer tools and fewer handoffs.
Vendor and engineering partnerships that treat resilience as a shared engineering problem rather than a compliance exercise.
A high-performing, globally distributed team with clear growth paths and a strong culture of ownership.

Requirements

• Significant experience leading enterprise application support, production support, middleware operations, or related technology service teams, ideally at global scale.
• Track record leading teams responsible for business-critical applications and platforms in a complex environment.
• Strong grounding in incident, problem, change, release, and service management practices.
• Experience managing third-party vendors and externally supplied technology within formal service frameworks.
• Sound judgment on operational risk, control design, and resiliency.
• Experience leading major incident response and driving stabilization.
• Strong stakeholder management across business and technology functions.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including executive-level reporting.
• Proven people leadership: hiring, coaching, performance management, and team growth.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in a regulated, high-availability, or global enterprise environment.
• Familiarity with middleware and integration technologies such as APIs, message brokers, ESBs, application servers, iPaaS platforms, or comparable technologies.
• Experience supporting hybrid environments spanning on-premise and cloud-based application estates.
• Knowledge of service monitoring, observability, automation, and operational tooling.
• Experience with vendor contracts, commercial support models, and cost management.
• ITIL certification or equivalent practical service management experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead the global team of 12 engineers responsible for the operational health of 50+ business-critical applications, middleware platforms, and third-party products.
• Own uptime, performance, and resilience against targets of 99.9-99.95%, and drive root cause resolution when targets are missed.
• Build support models, escalation paths, and runbooks that scale as the application portfolio grows.
• Lead major incident response and turn recurring issues into permanent fixes rather than repeat tickets.
• Ensure new systems and releases are genuinely production-ready before they land in support.
• Lead operational support for middleware, integration platforms, and interfaces connecting the application portfolio.
• Keep middleware environments secure, monitored, and performant through patching, upgrades, and capacity planning.
• Partner with infrastructure, cloud, network, and security teams to design for resilience and fast recovery.
• Modernize integration architecture over time, reducing fragility and technical debt in how systems communicate.
• Own the relationship and performance of externally supplied applications, SaaS products, and middleware vendors.
• Hold vendors accountable to SLAs and resolution targets, and escalate firmly when service quality slips.
• Shape vendor selection, onboarding, renewal, and exit decisions.
• Ensure third-party products are woven into the team’s support and security practices from day one.
• Define the KPIs and dashboards that show the team, and leadership, how the portfolio is actually performing.
• Get ahead of operational and supplier risk before it becomes an incident.
• Run post-incident and problem-management reviews that produce real fixes, not just documentation.
• Lead modernization initiatives, including cloud adoption, platform rationalization, and support model redesign.
• Build and grow a high-performing global team of 12 engineers: hire well, coach directly, and create real paths for advancement.
• Set clear expectations and give direct, useful feedback.
• Design coverage and on-call models that are sustainable, not merely compliant.
• Build a culture where engineers own outcomes and want to solve hard problems, not just close tickets.
• Build trusted relationships with business leaders, engineering, architecture, cybersecurity, and vendors.
• Translate technical issues into business impact for senior leadership, clearly and without spin.
• Represent the team in governance and planning forums, and bring outside perspective back to the team.

Benefits

• equal employment opportunity (EEO) to all persons regardless of age, color, national origin, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, race, religion, creed, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, genetic information, marital status, status with regard to public assistance, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law.
• reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director