Middleware and Applications Support Engineer Staffordshire Permanent £Negotiable To design, develop, implement, maintain and manage application services, providing expert technical advice and guidance on best operational practise throughout the development life cycle of changes to IT systems. The implementation, maintenance and operational management of business application services to meet agreed service levels; likewise for the systems infrastructure supporting those services, e.g., the systems integration middleware, corporate directory services (LDAP), web site access management (TAMeB). 2nd line BAU support for the above, including diagnosis, troubleshooting, incident management and problem management. Development of operational support processes, tools and techniques, including automation of routine tasks. Devising Disaster Recovery (DR) strategies, maintaining DR plans and testing those plans for supported services and infrastructure. Ensuring continued efficiency and availability of application services through performance monitoring and capacity planning. Controlled promotion of software and configuration changes to test and production environments. Involvement in the full development life-cycle for IT system change, including design, development, environment build and configuration, testing, fault resolution, tuning and documentation. Technical consultancy and leadership, providing expert advice and challenge to colleagues at all levels. Provision of round the clock technical support, including regular participation in an on-call support rota overnight and at weekends. Essential Experience Application support experience Windows or Unix system administration skills At least some of: Experience of design, development or systems administration using some of the following technologies: J2EE, Tomcat or .Net application servers; http servers and web site applications; IBM Websphere messaging and systems integration products; IBM Tivoli monitoring and security products; directory services protocols (LDAP or Active Directory); relational databases; content management systems; enterprise messaging and diary systems; secure electronic data transfer; web services and SOA; systems management tools; scripting languages, e.g., Perl. Desirable Knowledge of performance tuning and capacity planning Awareness of IT industry trends and best practice