Applications Operations Controller

Description

Position Summary 

The Applications Operations Controller (AOC) provides real-time operational control and service assurance for enterprise applications supporting DoD missions. This role monitors application health and dependencies, leads incident response, enforces change/release controls, and drives continuous improvement against SLAs/SLOs across classified and unclassified (IL4/5/6) environments.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

  

Monitoring & Incident Response

• Maintain 24x7 situational awareness of application, middleware, and database health (availability, latency, error rates, capacity).
• Triage, contain, and restore service during incidents using documented runbooks/playbooks, coordinate swarming with App Dev, DB, Platform, Network, and Cyber teams.
• Execute initial impact assessment, user comms, workarounds, and business continuity steps, capture timelines and decisions for post incident review.

Event & Observability Management

• Operate dashboards, alerts, and synthetic transactions; tune alert thresholds to reduce noise while protecting SLOs.
• Ensure logs/metrics/traces are collected and correlated (e.g., APM and SIEM) with actionable escalation paths.
• Validate monitoring for new releases (dashboards, health checks, and alerts are in place before go live).

Change, Release & Configuration Control

• Enforce CAB/CCB decisions, maintenance windows, freeze periods, and back out plans for application changes.
• Verify prerelease gates are met (approvals, rollback tested, health checks defined, comms prepared); validate post change health and user experience.
• Maintain accurate CMDB/CIs and application dependency maps, record changes and relationships for traceability.

Problem & Availability Management

• Lead problem investigations (recurring incidents, trend spikes); run root cause analysis (RCA) and corrective actions.
• Track availability, MTTR/MTBF, error budgets, and capacity trends; recommend scaling/refactoring or resiliency patterns (circuit breakers, graceful degradation).
• Drive backlog items with owners and verify closure via post implementation effectiveness checks.

Service Level Management & Reporting

• Measure and report SLAs/SLOs (uptime, response time, transaction success, ticket KPIs); provide daily/weekly/monthly executive rollups.
• Document user facing comms for incidents, maintenance, and changes; keep stakeholders updated throughout the event lifecycle.

Security & Compliance

• Operate within RMF and DISA STIG requirements; ensure patch and vulnerability windows are executed and documented.
• Protect data handling in operations (access control, least privilege, audit trails) and support evidence collection for assessments and ATO/cATO sustainment.
• Coordinate with Cyber/Blue Team on detections, containment steps, and after-action improvements.

Knowledge & Documentation

• Author and maintain runbooks, troubleshooting guides, operational standards, and service catalogs; keep knowledge articles current.
• Contribute to readiness reviews, go live checklists, and lessons learned, coach junior controllers and cross train peers.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities)

• Active DoD Secret Clearance 
• 4–7+ years in enterprise application operations, NOC/SOC/SRE, or mission operations for large environments (DoD/Federal preferred)
• DoD 8140-compliant certification (e.g., Security+).
• Strong grasp of incident/problem/change management (ITIL 4), service level management, and production release coordination.
• Working knowledge of application stacks (web/app tiers, APIs, message queues, databases), microservices/containers, and dependency mapping.
• Familiarity with observability/APM and SIEM concepts (dashboards, alerting, synthetic monitoring, correlation, RCA).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

  

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Top Secret/SCI Clearance
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, or equivalent combination of education and experience (4 additional years of relevant experience may substitute for a degree).
• ITIL® 4 Foundation (operations and service management).
• Splunk Core Certified User/Power User or APM vendor credential (e.g., AppDynamics Associate, Dynatrace Associate, Datadog Fundamentals)
• Platform foundations as applicable: Microsoft AZ 104 (Admin), RHCSA, KCNA (or CKA for advanced container ops), SQL Server/Oracle administrator associate.
• Prior exper