CIGNA

Application Development Senior Advisor - Hybrid

Raleigh, NC Full time

The Senior Application Support Engineer plays a pivotal role in ensuring the stability, performance, and reliability of mission-critical applications in a production environment. This role combines deep technical expertise with strong leadership to manage support operations, lead incident resolution efforts, and drive improvements in production support processes. The resource will work cross-functionally with engineering, infrastructure, DevOps, and business teams, while also mentoring support engineers and overseeing operational readiness for deployments.

We are seeking a resource with strong expertise in AWS Cloud to provide technical and managerial leadership to our production support operations. This role requires hands-on experience in supporting large-scale AWS-based applications, managing incidents, Health care domain experience, coordinating with cross-functional teams, and improving system reliability through proactive monitoring and process enhancement.

The ideal candidate will possess strong troubleshooting skills, deep understanding of AWS services, and the ability to coordinate support across multiple teams and time zones. This position also requires interaction with business users, participation in Agile processes, and ownership of application support KPIs. This role will help lead the resolution of incidents, document root causes, and guide the support team in delivering consistent, reliable production support services.

Roles and Responsibilities:

Leadership & Coordination

• Lead and coordinate daily production support operations, ensuring high availability of key applications

• Serve as the primary escalation point for high-severity (P1/P2) incidents, leading resolution and post-mortem efforts

•Provide technical and managerial leadership to the application support team

•Act as the primary point of contact between business, development, infrastructure, and offshore teams

•Coordinate and participate in scrum and stakeholder meetings, providing updates and prioritizing critical incidents

•Review and track team deliverables and provide regular status reports to stakeholders

•Manage client escalations and coordinate resolution efforts with upstream/downstream application teams

•Manage on-call rotations and provide support during critical after-hours events as needed

•Track SLAs and KPIs; report trends to stakeholders and drive performance improvements

•Mentor junior team members; foster a strong support culture grounded in accountability and responsiveness

Production Support & Monitoring

•Deliver Level 2 support for AWS-hosted applications by identifying and resolving technical issues

•Conduct daily health checks, application monitoring, and AWS Batch job triaging

•Monitor CloudWatch dashboards, set alarms, and investigate anomalies or failures

•Simulate and reproduce issues in lower environments and provide validated resolutions

•Provide after-hours support as needed and assist during application releases with validation and post-deployment checks

•Maintain and update issue logs, provide reconciliation reports, and ensure documentation of permanent fixes

Client & User Engagement

•Collaborate with business teams to troubleshoot and resolve user issues

•Participate in client calls, gather feedback, and simulate business-critical issues

•Schedule and deliver training sessions for business users and internal teams

•Support the client in user story and EPIC discussions and provide feedback for feature improvements

•Communicate production status and issues clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders

•Act as liaison between support, product, and engineering teams to ensure timely issue resolution and feedback loops

Knowledge Management & Documentation

•Develop and maintain Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and knowledge bases

•Document root cause analyses and track issues through the Production Support Assessment framework

•Ensure training and documentation for new processes, system updates, and enhancements

Tooling & Automation

•Identify opportunities to automate repetitive support tasks and improve observability

•Integrate tools such as Splunk, AppDynamics, Datadog, PagerDuty, and CI/CD pipelines to enhance support maturity

Required Skills & Experience:

Cloud & AWS Expertise

•5+ years of hands-on experience in AWS Cloud services: EC2, S3, Lambda, Glue, SQS, SNS, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, Step Functions, Batch, EKS, OpenSearch, EventBridge

•Experience with event-driven architecture and integrating services across AWS components

•Deep understanding of monitoring, alerting, and incident triaging using CloudWatch, Dynatrace, and Splunk

Application Support & Troubleshooting

•Strong experience in application/operations support, including triaging API, batch job, and workflow issues

•Proficient in monitoring step functions, Lambda executions, and diagnosing SQS queue and SNS notification behavior

•Hands-on experience working with OpenSearch and DynamoDB documents

•Excellent ability to reproduce production issues, validate fixes, and manage system health in cloud environments

Programming & Tools

•Proficiency in Python, including knowledge of object-oriented programming principles

•Experience developing APIs using FastAPI, Flask, or similar frameworks

•Familiarity with DevOps practices, including CI/CD tools and pipelines

•Strong command over incident and change management tools (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira)

Soft Skills & Mindset

•Strong communication and collaboration skills; able to work with technical and non-technical stakeholders

•Self-motivated, capable of prioritizing tasks in a dynamic, fast-paced Agile environment

•Comfortable managing tasks independently while also leading team initiatives and guiding junior engineers

•Excellent documentation and presentation skills; able to articulate technical issues clearly

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or related discipline

• 10+ years in application support or software operations, with 3+ years in a lead or senior capacity

•5+ years of hands-on experience in AWS Cloud services

• Experience supporting applications in regulated industries (healthcare, finance, etc.)

• AWS Solutions Architect certification.

• Exposure to containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes)

• Strong scripting and automation knowledge (Shell, Python, PowerShell, etc.)

• Excellent verbal and written communication; strong stakeholder engagement skills

• Familiarity with service management platforms (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira), and ITIL framework


If you will be working at home occasionally or permanently, the internet connection must be obtained through a cable broadband or fiber optic internet service provider with speeds of at least 10Mbps download/5Mbps upload.

About The Cigna Group

Doing something meaningful starts with a simple decision, a commitment to changing lives. At The Cigna Group, we’re dedicated to improving the health and vitality of those we serve. Through our divisions Cigna Healthcare and Evernorth Health Services, we are committed to enhancing the lives of our clients, customers and patients. Join us in driving growth and improving lives.

Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, age, disability, sex, childbirth (including pregnancy) or related medical conditions including but not limited to lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, religion, national origin, ancestry, marital or familial status, genetic information, status with regard to public assistance, citizenship status or any other characteristic protected by applicable equal employment opportunity laws.

If you require reasonable accommodation in completing the online application process, please email: SeeYourself@cigna.com for support. Do not email SeeYourself@cigna.com for an update on your application or to provide your resume as you will not receive a response.

The Cigna Group has a tobacco-free policy and reserves the right not to hire tobacco/nicotine users in states where that is legally permissible. Candidates in such states who use tobacco/nicotine will not be considered for employment unless they enter a qualifying smoking cessation program prior to the start of their employment. These states include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Washington State.

Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with all federal, state and local ordinances.