Application Operations Engineer

Application Operations Engineer

Reward Gateway, part of Edenred, is a global leader in benefits and employee engagement. We help businesses attract, engage, and retain top talent through strategic reward, recognition, and well-being solutions. Guided by our shared missions - 'Making the World a Better Place to Work' and 'Enriching Connections, For Good' - we're committed to transforming workplaces and improving people's daily lives. Our team embodies entrepreneurial spirit, innovation, and respect. We push boundaries, speak up, and stay human, fostering a culture where imagination thrives.

Your Role in our Mission:

This hands-on role sits at the intersection of operational excellence and engineering craft. You'll bridge the gap between traditional application support and software engineering by executing scripted remediation, configuration management, feature flag operations, safe, bounded code-level fixes, and runbook automation — all under clearly defined guardrails. The goal is to reduce unnecessary L3 escalations while increasing autonomy, quality, and impact for our Application Operations function. You'll apply these practices across our AWS environment (EKS), PHP services, and MySQL databases, using Datadog as our observability platform, Kibana for log exploration, and Heap to help quantify and understand customer impact.

What's In It For Me?

A chance to be part of an extremely well established, stable and high growth 'Unicorn' SaaS company with plenty of benefits in our employee benefits package, including:

• Annual Wellness Bonus
• Monthly Edenred Electronic Food Voucher
• Udemy: Access for your professional development
• Flexible Holiday plan & other leave benefits
• Book Benefit: Professional development books and an additional annual budget for fiction books of your choice
• Subsidised sports card and many other benefits!

Flexible Hybrid Working:

This is a hybrid role that would require presence in office at least twice per week, as agreed.

What You'll be Doing:

• L2.5 Operations Delivery
• Engineering Practices Within Operations
• Observability and Service Readiness
• Technical Operations and Incident Participation
• Quality, Process, and Continuous Improvement
• Stakeholder Collaboration
• Scope and Interfaces (complementary to SRE)

Experience and Skills You Need in this Role:

Essential

• Proven experience in application support or operations engineering in cloud environments, ideally supporting PHP services running on Kubernetes (EKS) with MySQL backends.
• Hands-on capability in at least one backend language (PHP preferred; Python or similar also valuable) sufficient to read, diagnose, and write safe operational scripts and minor fixes under guardrails.
• Practical Kubernetes skills for operations: kubectl/Helm basics, investigating pods/deployments, reading logs/events, understanding readiness/liveness probes, and performing safe rollouts/rollbacks within documented guardrails.
• MySQL operational fluency: connection and pool issues, slow query detection, query plan basics, common remediation patterns (e.g., indexing recommendations to hand to L3, safe data fixes under runbook guardrails), and understanding of replication/backup implications.
• Strong experience using Datadog (APM/metrics/traces/dashboards/alerts) for investigation and detection; confident using Kibana for log exploration and correlation; ability to leverage Heap to assess user impact and prioritize remediation.
• Familiarity with ITSM tooling (e.g., Jira Service Management) and ITIL-aligned incident and problem management processes.
• Strong communication skills; clear, concise documentation; collaborative approach focused on reducing toil, increasing automation, and raising the quality bar.

Desirable

• Experience with feature flag platforms and configuration-as-code within safe operational guardrails.
• Familiarity with AWS services that commonly interface with PHP/EKS workloads (e.g., CloudWatch, ALB, S3, SQS) and how they surface in Datadog and Kibana.
• Exposure to service onboarding/operability reviews, SLOs, and contributing to a Service Catalogue.
• Experience balancing incident response with proactive improvement work in Agile contexts; strong documentation discipline.

The Interview Process:

• Interview process: technical interview with Application Operations leadership and a PETO peer; practical scenario or technical assessment relevant to the L2.5 operating model

On-call rotation with fair schedules, clear escalation paths, and emphasis on post-incident learning and sustainable practices. At Reward Gateway | Edenred we are committed to ensuring an inclusive and accessible recruitment process for all candidates. If you have any specific requirements or need reasonable adjustments at any stage of the recruitment journey, please let your Talent Acquisition Partner know. Your needs are important to us, and we want to ensure an equitable experience for every candidate.

Be comfortable. Be you.

At Reward Gateway, we want all our employees to feel comfortable bringing their passion, creativity and individuality to work. We value all cultures, backgrounds, and experiences, as we truly believe that diversity drives innovation. Express yourself, join our community and help us Make the World a Better Place to Work.

About Reward Gateway

Reward Gateway is culture and client driven. We're obsessed with putting the "Human" in HR and are proud to have been 100% dedicated to HR for over a decade. Since 2007, we've been right by the side of the world's most innovative HR people, giving them beautiful products and tools they can use to attract, engage and retain their people. The world's most successful companies treat their people differently. They generate stock market returns of twice their peers and they have half the employee turnover. 76% of CEOs recognize that employee engagement is vital to their success but only 24% say they have a highly engaged company.

Bridging that engagement gap is what drives us.

Our Hiring Process

Stage 1: Applied

Stage 2: Review

Stage 3: Final Interview

Stage 4: Hired

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