Director, Application Support

The Director, Application Support leads application support and maintenance in a fast-paced retail environment, ensuring reliable services and alignment with business goals. The role oversees internal teams and managed service providers, IT service management, major incidents, stakeholder communications, budgets, and operational governance. Working across business and technology teams, the Director drives service quality, continuous improvement, and team development through strong leadership, technical expertise, and a customer-focused approach.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Own L1/L2/L3 application support for store systems, merchandising, supply chain/WMS, ERP, enterprise tools, eCommerce/OMS and integrations.
• Lead incident, major incident, problem, service request, change, and escalation management, including root cause analysis, executive communications, and prevention of recurring incidents.
• Manage application health and service levels; report availability, mean time to restore service (MTTR), ticket volume and aging, and SLA performance.
• Partner with Business Solutions, Development, Infrastructure, Security, Integration, and Store Operations on releases, deployments, and operational readiness throughout the application lifecycle.
• Support the VP of IT Operations in aligning IT strategy and business objectives through collaboration across business and technology teams.
• Strengthen application reliability through end-to-end observability, using metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and actionable alerts to detect issues proactively, reduce alert noise, and accelerate diagnosis.
• Improve support efficiency through automation and knowledge management, including reusable runbooks, automated incident enrichment and routing, and controlled remediation to reduce repetitive tasks, manual effort, and recovery time.
• Manage budgets, operational governance, and application lifecycle and technical debt roadmaps.
• Build and develop high-performing teams.
• Oversee vendor and managed service providers.

Skills:

• Communicate clearly with technical, non-technical, and executive audiences, adapting messages to their needs.
• Apply ITIL or equivalent service management frameworks and define technical standards that meet SLA requirements.
• Proficiency with service management tools (e.g., ServiceNow), observability platforms, and automation technologies. 
• Demonstrated experience supporting high-volume software environments. 
• Manage third-party vendors and multiple functional areas within a managed services model.
• Lead, mentor, and develop application support teams, including performance management, team building, and conflict resolution.
• Adept at facilitating cross-team agreements. 
• Work independently and effectively under pressure, solve problems, and quickly assess the business impact of technology issues.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in IT, computer science, or a related field, or equivalent relevant work experience required.
• 8–15 years of IT experience, including 5+ years leading application support or operations teams, with experience managing managers, large support organizations, and application portfolios.
• Strong background in ITSM, ITIL, incident and problem management, and ServiceNow or similar tools.
• Experience managing vendors, managed services, and offshore support teams.
• Budget, contract, and operational governance experience.
• Retail experience with store and merchandising systems strongly preferred

Start Rate = $172,000 to $188,000 based on experience plus a 25% bonus and equity. The company offers Health, Dental, & Vision, a flexible spending account, life and disability insurance benefits, a 401k plan, PTO, paid holidays annually, and an employee stock purchase plan.