Application Support Manager

Willis Re is expanding it’s Global business in 2026 and developing its own applications whilst leveraging industry leading business applications to support business operation and growth.

The Application Support Manager is a key role and is accountable for the operational support, stability, performance, availability and continual improvement of the organisation's Front Office applications.

The role is responsible for the full application delivery lifecycle is managed effectively and in accordance with agreed service levels and business expectations. The role acts as the primary interface between the business, technology teams and third-party suppliers to ensure the Front Office application services remain secure, compliant and aligned to business objectives.

Key Responsibilities 

• Provide key stakeholder ownership for Front Office Application Support and liaise with the Support function to manage the application through the full lifecycle whilst ensuring all issues are addressed in a timely manner. 
• Own the operational support and service performance of the Front Office business-critical applications.
• Ensure applications are stable, available, secure, performant, and fit for business use.
• Maintain clear ownership of application support processes, escalation paths, service documentation, and operational procedures.
• Ensure application services are delivered in line with agreed SLAs, OLAs, KPIs, and business expectations.
• Work with business stakeholders to understand application usage, business criticality, and operational risk.
• Maintain visibility of application dependencies, including infrastructure, databases, integrations, APIs, third-party services, and downstream systems.

2. Incident and Major Incident Management

• Lead resolution of application incidents, acting as the senior escalation point and coordinating teams, vendors, service desk, and business users to minimise disruption.
• Ensure incidents are logged, prioritised, resolved, and communicated effectively, with timely business updates during service disruption.
• Support major incident processes, including impact assessment, stakeholder updates, post-incident reviews, and service improvement actions.

3. Defect/ Problem Management

• Lead the analysis and remediation of recurring or high-impact issues, ensuring root cause analysis and corrective actions are completed.
• Track known errors, workarounds, remediation plans, and incident trends to reduce repeat failures and service risk.
• Work with technical teams and vendors to deliver long-term fixes and maintain records through governance forums.

4. Change, Release, and Deployment Support

• Ensure application changes are assessed, tested, approved, and implemented through agreed change processes.
• Assess operational readiness for releases, upgrades, patches, and deployments, including documentation and rollback planning.
• Represent support in change forums, coordinate release communications, and support post-implementation reviews.

5. Application Monitoring and Service Performance

• Provide oversight of application monitoring for availability, performance, capacity, alerts, and transaction health.
• Use dashboards, service reports, and operational metrics to identify risks, degradation, and improvement opportunities.
• Work with technical teams to resolve performance bottlenecks and improve monitoring, logging, observability, and reporting.

6. Leadership and Management

• Contribute to the development of the Application Support team, contributing to setting standards, processes and performance expectations.
• Manage escalations, and matrix orientated team capability through reviews, coaching, and training plans where applicable in close collaboration with mangers and the leadership team.
• Build a customer-focused, accountable support culture and promote collaboration across technology and business teams.

7. Stakeholder and Business Relationship Management

• Act as the primary operational contact for business stakeholders, application owners, and senior management.
• Translate technical issues into clear business impact, providing regular updates on performance, risks, incidents, and changes.
• Facilitate service reviews, manage expectations during disruption, and use feedback to improve support services.

8. Supplier and Vendor Management

• Assist with managing vendors and support providers to ensure contractual service obligations, SLAs, and KPIs are met.
• Provide insight in supplier reviews, escalations, and performance improvement discussions, challenging poor performance where required.
• Support renewals, license reviews, commercial evaluations, and ensure vendor dependencies and escalation paths are documented.

9. Governance, Risk, and Compliance

• Ensure application support complies with IT policies, security standards, audit requirements, and regulatory obligations.
• Maintain operational controls for access, change, incidents, releases, service continuity, and compliance reporting.
• Manage risks, audit evidence, remediation actions, access reviews, vulnerabilities, and governance escalations.

10. Application Lifecycle and Documentation

• Oversee the development and maintenance of accurate runbooks, knowledge articles, support models, dependency maps, and escalation procedures.
• Support lifecycle planning for features, upgrades, patching, rationalisation, migration, retirement, and end-of-support risks.
• Ensure new and changed applications are supportable, documented, monitored, and operationally ready for live service.

11. Service Reporting and Operational Governance

• Produce service reports covering incidents, SLA performance, availability, changes, problems, risks, and improvements.
• Provide clear insight, dashboards, and management information to support service decisions and prioritisation.
• Support service reviews, governance forums, and action tracking through to completion.

12. Continuous Improvement and Automation

• Identify opportunities to improve service quality, efficiency, stability, automation, and user experience.
• Reduce avoidable incidents through proactive maintenance, knowledge management, tooling, training, and problem resolution.
• Promote continual improvement, operational maturity, application modernisation, and industry best practice.

13. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

• Ensure supported applications have appropriate continuity, recovery, and operational resilience arrangements.
• Maintain recovery objectives, recovery procedures, business impact requirements, and tested support readiness.
• Support disaster recovery testing, continuity planning, resilience exercises, and post-change plan reviews.

About You

Core Skills & Experience

Essential: Degree in IT, Computer Science or equivalent experience; ITIL Foundation Certification, Desirable: ITIL Managing Professional, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Agile or Scrum certifications.

Experience 

• Proven experience in Application Development, Application Support, or IT Operations role
• Experience leading technical support teams. 
• Experience supporting business-critical enterprise applications. 
• Proven supplier and stakeholder management skills
• Experience of supporting trading applications/ high value applications

About Willis Re

We combine specialist broking with analytics, modeling and research to help insurers optimize risk transfer, strengthen balance sheets and achieve sustainable growth. Our approach is relationship-driven, transparent and outcome-focused.

At the heart of Willis Re is a focus on delivering the most cutting-edge analytical solutions to enable more informed, better decision-making for risk selection, portfolio optimization, and capital management.

The launch of Willis Re brings a strategic advantage of being unhindered by legacy, an ability to leverage data, statistical models and advanced technologies with the best knowledge and expertise to deliver more efficient and effective reinsurance outcomes. This places Willis Re in a unique position to build a truly analytically driven business, focused on creating solutions for the reinsurance industry that are future led and forward thinking.

Willis Re will also leverage recognized technical expertise from WTW’s Insurance Consulting & Technology business including their advanced modeling and analytical capabilities. Alongside this will be WTW’s Research Network, an award-winning business supporting and influencing science to improve the understanding and quantification of risk.

Willis Re is committed to embracing a diverse, inclusive, and flexible work environment. We provide equal opportunity to all qualified individuals regardless of race, colour, religion, age, gender, gender expression, national origin, veteran status, disability, orientation, or any other legally protected categories. If you have a need that requires accommodation, please email us at [email protected]