Application Support Lead (SAP & Retail)- UAE

About the Company

Responsibilities

• ● Lead and mentor the application support team (L1/L2), setting priorities, allocating work and coaching engineers on diagnostics and escalation.
• ● Act as the L2/L3 escalation point for high-severity (P1/P2) incidents, coordinating response across IT, business and vendor teams.
• ● Own SLA and KPI performance, and report on incident trends, ticket volumes, MTTR and recurring issues to management.
• ● Lead support for SAP and retail applications, covering SAP, POS/BOS, web, mobile and loyalty platforms.
• ● Support and monitor integrations and interfaces between systems (for example IDocs, middleware, APIs and EDI), resolving data-flow and queue failures.
• ● Perform deeper diagnostics, including log analysis, configuration review and data validation.
• ● Manage application configuration and master-data activities (item, price, promotion, customer and loyalty data).
• ● Lead structured root cause analysis for major and recurring incidents, and drive permanent fixes.
• ● Raise, track and escalate defects with software vendors and implementation partners until closure, and hold vendors to agreed SLAs.
• ● Maintain the problem register, known-error database and knowledge base, and write SOPs and runbooks.
• ● Support release, regression and smoke testing for SAP and retail applications, including UAT coordination with business users.
• ● Own operational acceptance of new features and changes: confirm supportability, monitoring, documentation and handover readiness before go-live.
• ● Take part in change management and CAB, assessing risk and impact of planned changes, and lead post-deployment validation and hypercare.
• ● Apply ITIL-aligned incident, problem, change and service request processes.
• ● Identify automation and process improvements that reduce incident volume and resolution time.
• ● Maintain clear technical and process documentation and support audit and compliance requests.

Requirements

• ● Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or a related field.
• ● E xperience in application support or IT operations, including at least 4 years in a lead or senior L2/L3 role.
• ● Hands-on experience supporting SAP applications in a production environment.
• ● Proven experience leading incident response for P1/P2 issues and running root cause analysis.
• ● Experience with log analysis, configuration management and master-data support.
• ● Experience with release, regression and UAT testing.
• ● Experience managing vendors and escalating product defects.
• ● Strong working knowledge of ITSM tools (for example ServiceNow or Jira).
• ● Excellent communication skills in English, with the ability to explain technical issues to non-technical stakeholders.
• ● ITIL Foundation certification (ITIL 4 preferred).
• ● Experience supporting retail applications: POS, BOS, loyalty, omnichannel, mobile and e-commerce platforms.
• ● SAP Retail, SAP CAR, Dynamics 365 Commerce or similar retail platform experience.
• ● Vendor or product certifications (SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce or equivalent).
• ● Working knowledge of SQL, monitoring tools and API testing tools