Application Support Engineer

Over the last 20 years, Ares' success has been driven by our people and our culture. Today, our team is guided by our core values – Collaborative, Responsible, Entrepreneurial, Self-Aware, Trustworthy – and our purpose to be a catalyst for shared prosperity and a better future. Through our recruitment, career development and employee-focused programming, we are committed to fostering a welcoming and inclusive work environment where high-performance talent of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives can build careers within this exciting and growing industry.

Job Description

Seeking a highly motivated and well-rounded Application Production Support Associate to join our global support team. This is a unique opportunity to join a growing and dynamic team responsible for business application support. The team primarily works out of the Los Angeles, New York, and India offices and supports the firm in a global capacity.

The Associate will be responsible for providing L1 and L2 support to Investment and Shared Services applications and platforms. The ideal candidate will have excellent technical skills and a strong business application support background and will be expected to partner with the business users and different IT teams. Candidates must have a good understanding of the Life Cycle of investment trades in credit products (Bank Debt, Loans) or equivalent alternative asset product knowledge.

The candidate must also possess strong soft skills, the ability to learn and adapt to changes and be flexible. This role will also require support for our End Of Day processes, application access provisioning, supporting monitoring tools and we need candidate to have sound knowledge in ITIL processes, critical business processes support, and familiarity with APIs, Python, SSH, Power BI, and SQL for integration. Salesforce domain knowledge, application transition experience and automation are a plus.

Primary functions and essential responsibilities

• Act as a liaison between the business users and the Technology team.
• Provide L1/L2 functional and technical support to Investment and Shared Services applications and platforms.
• Provide rotational follow-the-sun support coverage for APAC, London, and Los Angeles users.
• Participate in after-hours rotational on-call support, including potential weekends and firm holidays.
• Exhibit a strong sense of ownership and urgency in handling support incidents, requests, and follow-ups with clients until a satisfactory resolution is achieved.
• Apply ITSM tool to provide quality incidents, request tickets, and use JIRA for assigned APS projects.
• Lead and drive transition initiatives to onboard support for new applications to the APS Team from L1, L2, and Monitoring perspective.
• Demonstrate the ability and willingness to document support workflows.
• Responsible for effective communication and interaction with the Business Users, Application Owners, and other IT teams.
• Use Critical Incident and Problem management processes to assist in removing repeated issues and provide strategic solutions.
• Clear understanding of monitoring solutions for business-critical applications.
• Handle and deliver assigned projects related to production stability, software EOL, and associated application maintenance.
• Knowledge of ITIL processes such as IT Operations, Release, Change, and Access management
• Send user communication related to production incidents and application maintenance.
• Strong familiarity with ITSM tool ServiceNow, logging all incidents, requiring accurate priorities, detailed descriptions of issues, updates, and resolutions, including composing and creating RCA tickets.

Qualifications

Education:

• BS or equivalent experience in Computer Science or technical training and professional work experience.

Experience Required:

• Candidate should have 4-6 years of experience in the financial industry or asset management in an Application Production Support capacity.
• Prior working experience with supporting Salesforce platform.
• Experience with application transition is preferred.
• Exposure to one or more of the following business platforms is strongly preferred:
  • Trading and Settlements Platforms (example: Black Mountain Systems – Everest)
  • Portfolio Accounting (examples: Advent – Geneva, Markit - Wall Street Office)
  • Risk Management systems or performance reporting systems (EagleCloud, data warehouse)
• Strong familiarity with SQL, particularly T-SQL, SSRS/SSIS.
• Experience with Power BI for data mining and reporting is a huge plus
• Strong familiarity with productivity tools like Jira, Confluence, MS Office tools, specifically Excel utilizing Pivot table.
• Prior exposure to supporting ServiceNow, any Job orchestration tool, SharePoint, or other Corporate Systems platform.
• Light development experience utilizing Python programming, ITIL is preferred.

General Requirements:

• Dependable, great attitude, highly motivated, and a team player.
• Detail-oriented, ability to perform analysis, and communicate gaps in analysis to business and requirements to APS leads.
• A self-directed individual with a can-do attitude, willing to work in an energetic, collaborative, and fast-paced environment, proactive in nature, and a proven ability to learn quickly, display flexibility and adaptability while resolving issues with minimal supervision.
• Demonstrated ability to learn new systems quickly.
• Experience in monitoring critical jobs, processes and applications.
• Leveraged monitoring tools and applications to perform the above function.
• Solid sense of ownership and accountability.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Excellent organizational and interpersonal skills.
• Outstanding communication (written and verbal), presentation, documentation, and interpersonal skills; strong customer focus.
• Flexibility regarding role profile and willingness to take on new projects and learn new skills.
• Good judgment in terms of escalating issues vs. solving problems independently.
• Ability to be flexible in terms of hours to coordinate with team members across various time zones.

Reporting Relationships

There is no set deadline to apply for this job opportunity. Applications will be accepted on an ongoing basis until the search is no longer active.

---