Principal Application Support Engineer

King County•Chinook Building 401 5th Avenue Seattle, WA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

This position is only open to Internal King County employees. Only current King County employees will be considered. The King County Information Technology (KCIT) Custom and Cloud Applications Team is hiring a Principal Application Support Engineer to lead support activities for applications spanning various business domains of King County, particularly in Law-Safety-Justice, E-commerce and Accessor & Treasury applications. This specialist and technical lead position will focus on onboarding new systems through continuous integration & deployment pipelines, performing upgrades, building and monitoring system alerts and dashboards, resolving production issues, and managing application lifecycles both on-premises and cloud hosting environments mainly in Azure. The successful candidate will apply software development and data management skills to support coding, scripting, system monitoring, process improvement, application security, and configuration management. They will troubleshoot complex issues across application and platform layers while collaborating closely with KCIT divisions managing Information & Cyber security, Network, Cloud infrastructure, Database & Operating Systems, Servers, Software Engineering, and Project Management teams. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in production incident management, application troubleshooting, observability, and support operations, with a learning mindset for improving the reliability and operational maturity of critical applications. About King County Department of Information Technology (KCIT) King County is committed to being the best-run government in the nation, and King County Information Technology (KCIT) is helping lead that transformation. KCIT harnesses the power of technology to modernize operations, advance digital equity and social justice, and deliver innovative solutions that engage, empower, and serve our residents, businesses, and community partners. Recognized by the National Association of Counties (NACo) for excellence in vision, strategy, innovation, and collaboration, KCIT is focused on delivering smart, secure, and customer-centered technology services that strengthen county operations and support thriving, resilient communities. As the technology business partner to all 18 County departments, KCIT provides the foundational systems and services that power many of the region’s most essential functions. We work side-by-side with our partners to design and deliver technology solutions that enhance customer experience and advance King County’s mission. Learn more about KCIT at: http://kingcounty.gov/depts/it.aspx. This recruitment may be used to fill additional vacancies that may occur.

Requirements

Minimum of six (6) years of experience in supporting business software systems and applications.
Experience in Azure application support, Kubernetes operations, container platforms, observability, performance troubleshooting, incident management and root cause analysis.
Proficiency in coding environments tools such as Visual Studio, VS Code, Azure Dev Ops, SSMS, IIS.
Proficiency in coding languages such as C#, JavaScript, PowerShell, SQL and experience with continuous integration and deployment process.
Experience with Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, operational dashboards, telemetry strategy and alert tuning.
Experience with Azure DevOps and/or GitHub Actions, automation and scripting experience using PowerShell or Bash.
Knowledge of Kubernetes security, RBAC and policy controls.
Familiarity with Azure platform services, including Virtual Networks, Load Balancers, Application Gateway, Key Vault, Storage Accounts, Azure AD / Entra ID, identity and access patterns.
Experience to support and troubleshoot deployment and release issues in Azure DevOps and/or GitHub Actions.
Experience working closely with development, DevOps, infrastructure, database, and security teams to oversee system enhancements & upgrades, resolve issues and improve supportability & reliability, reduce recurring incidents, and build operational maturity.
Experience with change management processes to facilitate complex system changes; identify, analyze, and prioritize system change requests; assess potential impacts to applications from changes implemented by other IT teams.
Demonstrated change management competencies, collaborative leadership skills and personal accountability.
Proficiency in Microsoft troubleshooting application issues involving servers, Azure, networking, information security; track, resolve, and document system problems and issues requiring a broad understanding of complex systems.
Familiarity with troubleshooting Kubernetes issues involving pods, deployments, services, ingress, config maps, secrets, node pools, scaling and cluster health.
Demonstrated competence with MS Windows operating systems and MS Office products (Teams, Excel, Word, Outlook, Visio).
Ability to lead teams through all phases of project delivery lifecycle, and to work effectively with minimal supervision.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including presentation to non-technical audiences.
High degree of general IT support maturity and demonstrated confidentiality and customer service orientation.
Demonstrated technical writing skills to create end-user documentation including help files, diagnostics approach and results, gap analyses, system overview diagrams and flowcharts.
Ability to work closely with key stakeholders to develop and maintain technical documentation, prepare training materials, and conduct training sessions for technical staff.

Nice To Haves

Six (6) years of work experience in software development support, preferably related to cloud hosting environments.
Certification or equivalent experience in systems engineering.
Experience in managing servers, networks and cloud resources.
Azure / Kubernetes certifications or equivalent experience

Responsibilities

Support complex and high-impact IT solutions to serve business partners.
Support applications and other IT solutions hosted on premises and in the Cloud, especially in modern hosting platforms and keep up with emerging technologies.
Troubleshoot, configure and implement applications and related components.
Operate and maintain applications in the team's support portfolio, including relevant data and IT processes.
Oversee architectural designs as a technical lead role for new IT solutions to support evolving business needs.
Lead day-to-day application issue resolutions, manage communications and provide after-hours application support.
Act as the lead contact point for system support issues, explain business processes, resolve system issues, work with internal and external system users.