Application Development Manager - HIH - Evernorth

NTRODUCTION TO EVERNORTH: 

Evernorth Health Services India, established in Hyderabad in 2024, is an innovation hub for Evernorth Health Services, the pharmacy, care and benefits division of The Cigna Group. The innovation hub will support innovation-focused areas, such as generative AI, product development, process improvement, analytics, and software engineering across The Cigna Group and its businesses.  Evernorth Health Services India builds on The Cigna Group’s existing presence in India.

About Evernorth Health Services:

Evernorth Health Services (Evernorth) is the pharmacy, care and benefits solution division of The Cigna Group - a Fortune 16 global health company with 75,000 employees, 186 million customers in more than 30 countries and jurisdictions around the world. Evernorth exists to make the prediction, prevention, and treatment of illness and disease more accessible to millions of people. We do this by creating and connecting premier health services offerings, such as benefits management, pharmacy, care solutions, insights and intelligence.

About Cigna:

The Cigna Group is a global health company committed to improving the health and vitality of individuals and communities around the world and includes products and services marketed under its Cigna Healthcare and Evernorth Health Services subsidiaries. Cigna Healthcare is the health benefits provider of The Cigna Group, serving customers and clients through its U.S. Employer, U.S. Government, and International Health business. Evernorth Health Services is the pharmacy, care and benefits solution division of The Cigna Group.

Application Development Manager - HIH - Evernorth

Position Overview

In this role, you will be responsible for leading and overseeing teams that ensure the stability, performance, compliance, and operational excellence of enterprise applications across multiple technology platforms. This role provides strategic and people leadership for production support, application lifecycle management, and operational delivery, while serving as a key liaison between technology, business, and external partners.

The manager sets the direction for day-to-day production operations, drives continuous improvement, ensures regulatory compliance, and enables successful delivery of business-critical processes in coordination with their U.S based partners. This role balances hands on resource and technical oversight with leadership accountability and portfolio support across a complex, regulated environment.  This position will provide technical leadership for resources working on trouble shooting of incidents, application performance monitoring, outage response, SLA monitoring of feed files/job run, coordinate infrastructure upgrades, dashboarding, troubleshooting and corrective actions, incident management, problem management, generating and publishing proper documentation.

In this position, you will also be coordinating daily work with Evernorth and Vendor production support resources working across technologies and round the clock shifts.

This is a hands-on position with visibility to the Evernorth℠ Senior Leadership who are motivated to see the successful results of our efforts.

Responsibilities

People & Team Leadership

•  Lead, coach, and develop Application Support and Production Operations Specialists across multiple technologies, such Oracle EBS, Hyperion, mainframe, and distributed applications
•  Establish performance expectations, provide regular feedback, and support career development, succession planning, and talent growth within the team.
•  Oversee resource alignment, utilization, recruitment, performance management, skill coverage, and workforce planning to ensure continuous 24/7 production support coverage aligned to business needs
• Identify opportunities and drives process improvements (including automation) to refine existing production support model to implement a lean support model
• Foster a culture of operational excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement across global delivery teams.

Production & Application Operations Oversight

•  Provide leadership oversight for production support operations, including timely incident resolution, first‑level troubleshooting, outage response, and root cause analysis with proper documentation across supported applications.
•  Oversee 24/7 application monitoring to ensure system health, availability, performance, and proactive issue identification and resolution.  Provide technical leadership for 24 x 7 first level outage response
•  Oversee batch cycles, job scheduling, release implementations, and code promotions to meet defined SLAs and OLAs
•  Ensure effective coordination with upstream and downstream systems, infrastructure teams, and business partners.
•  Identify and drive process improvements, including automation, to refine and evolve the production support model toward a lean and efficient operating framework.
• Provide technical leadership for first level trouble shooting of incidents and root cause analysis

 Architecture, Stability & Efficiency

•  Drive automation, standardization, and operational efficiency initiatives to reduce manual effort and operational risk.
• Ensure application architecture currency and alignment with enterprise technology standards.
•  Oversee the retirement of obsolete jobs, reports, and applications in accordance with governance and retention policies.
• Ensure team partners with architecture and engineering teams to support application modernization, platform evolution, and long‑term stability initiatives.

Risk, Compliance & Audit Management

•  Ensure compliance with regulatory and control requirements, including SOX, CIP, segregation of duties, and audit readiness.
• Oversee disaster recovery planning and testing to ensure application resiliency and business continuity.
• Coordinate responses to infrastructure, security, and compliance surveys (e.g., CMDB, CSCI, security profiles).
• Ensure vulnerabilities and remediation efforts are tracked, prioritized, and completed.

Vendor & Stakeholder Management

•  Manage relationships with software vendors and hosted solution providers, including issue resolution and patch coordination.
•  Collaborate with enterprise partners to align priorities, delivery expectations, and operational schedules

Portfolio & Strategic Initiative Support

•  Provide resourcing and oversight for baseline production support of strategic initiatives and enterprise programs
•  Ensure applications and codebases remain compliant with platform, infrastructure, and regulatory changes.
•  Balance operational stability with delivery of enhancements and continuous improvement initiatives.

Reporting & Communication

• Review and present operational status reporting (e.g., WSRs, executive summaries)
• Communicate production risks, trends, and improvement opportunities clearly and proactively.
• Ensure accurate documentation, runbooks, and knowledge management practices are maintained by the team.

Other Duties as Assigned

• Perform additional responsibilities as required to support departmental and organizational objectives.

Qualifications

Required Skills:

•  11+ years of experience providing Production Support for mission‑critical, high‑performance applications, with experience in healthcare and finance, and a strong understanding of enterprise application support, production operations, and IT business integration.
• Proven people management and leadership skills, including leading global, cross‑location production support teams, strong interpersonal and relationship‑management abilities, and effective influencing and negotiation skills.
• Experience managing production support across diverse platforms and technologies, including Java, .NET, Mainframe, Oracle ERP/EPM, and distributed systems, with familiarity and working knowledge across these environments.
• Deep working knowledge of job scheduling tools such as ESP, and a strong understanding of application scheduling across multiple technologies.
• Strong analytical, problem‑solving, and decision‑making skills with a focus on system stability, long‑term solutions, and continuous operational improvement, including hands‑on experience implementing Lean methodologies.
• Experience using ServiceNow for incident, request, and problem management.
• Experience creating dashboards and establishing, monitoring, and publishing KPIs for senior leadership.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills, including executive‑level reporting and stakeholder engagement in a global team environment.
• Strong time and project management skills.
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies, including Kanban and Scrum.

Required Experience & Education: 

• 11+ years of experience in Production Support, including a minimum of 5+ years leading or managing Production Support or technical teams in production or operational environments, with proven success developing and growing team talent.
• Bachelor’s degree in technology, business, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Experience operating within regulated environments, including SOX, Information Protection, and internal/external audit requirements.
• Proven experience working in onshore/offshore and hybrid delivery models, partnering with US‑based and vendor teams, and managing vendor relationships.

Desired Experience:  

• Exposure to application modernization, automation, and operational transformation initiatives.
• Familiarity with enterprise monitoring, scheduling, and automation platforms.
• Accounting and Healthcare experience, or experience within other highly regulated industries.
• Industry certifications such as ITIL Foundation or ITIL Specialist certifications are preferred.

Equal Opportunity Statement

Evernorth is an Equal Opportunity Employer actively encouraging and supporting organization-wide involvement of staff in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts to educate, inform and advance both internal practices and external work with diverse client populations.

About Evernorth Health Services