Application Performance Jobs in Illinois (NOW HIRING)

Wolters Kluwer is seeking a motivated and talented Lead AppOps Engineer to join our dynamic team. This role is ideal for an individual with hands-on experience in application operations, production support, and cloud-platform application management within a mature engineering environment. As a Lead AppOps Engineer, you will play a crucial role in ensuring the stability, reliability, availability, and operational excellence of our enterprise applications.

In this role, your primary responsibility will be managing the end-to-end operational lifecycle of critical applications. You will work closely with engineering teams, Cloud Operations, Security, Compliance, and other key partners to ensure smooth application deployments, reliable production operation, robust monitoring, and proactive issue prevention. While DevSecOps engineering and CI/CD pipeline development remain important components of the ecosystem, this role places greater emphasis on application runtime health, operational workflows, incident management, release readiness, and environment reliability.

You will be involved in a wide range of application-centric operational tasks, including monitoring application health, performance optimization, managing incidents and escalations, coordinating releases, and ensuring proper alerting, logging, and observability. Your foundational understanding of application behavior, platform dependencies, and production operations will be critical as you help implement operational best practices and optimize runbook-driven workflows. You will also collaborate with senior engineers and architects to maintain strong application performance and platform resiliency.

As a Lead AppOps Engineer, you will be expected to actively participate in operational reviews, root cause analysis, change management, and continuous improvement of application support processes. You will work on initiatives that require attention to detail, strong analytical thinking, and a commitment to operational quality. Your ability to collaborate effectively, communicate clearly with cross-functional teams, and partner with stakeholders will be essential to delivering reliable and high-quality application services.

This position offers a fantastic opportunity for growth and career development within a supportive, modern, and innovative environment. You will have the chance to work with enterprise-scale applications, modern observability tools, and cloud platforms while supporting a high-performing team. If you are passionate about application operations, reliability, and service excellence, we encourage you to apply and join our team at Wolters Kluwer.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own production reliability for critical applications; define and track SLOs, error budgets, and capacity/performance baselines.
• Lead major incident response, drive clear business/technical communications, and ensure data-driven root cause analysis with preventative actions.
• Direct release and change operations: assess risk, enforce readiness gates, validate post-deployment health, and improve change success rate.

• Architect operational observability: design dashboards, alert strategies, log/trace pipelines, and runbook automation for rapid diagnosis and recovery.
• Establish and continuously improve operational standards, guardrails, and runbooks; automate repetitive tasks to reduce toil.
• Partner with engineering on resiliency patterns (circuit breakers, bulkheads, graceful degradation, retries) and performance tuning.
• Plan and execute capacity management, scaling strategies, and DR/BCP readiness, including failover testing and scenario exercises.
• Champion security-by-default in operations: secrets hygiene, patch/vulnerability remediation, certificate/DNS management, least-privilege access.
• Mentor AppOps engineers; provide technical guidance, code/review for automation, and develop on-call excellence.
• Drive service reviews with stakeholders; publish operational KPIs (MTTR, change success rate, incident rate) and lead continuous improvement roadmaps.
• Application Runtime Management: Monitor application health, availability, and performance across environments; proactively identify issues and optimize application behavior.
• Incident & Problem Management: Triage, investigate, and resolve production incidents; participate in root cause analysis and drive long-term fixes.
• Release & Deployment Operations: Coordinate and execute application deployments, ensure release readiness, validate post-deployment health, and collaborate with engineering teams for smooth rollouts.
• Environment & Configuration Management: Maintain application environments, configuration baselines, secrets, access controls, and platform dependencies, ensuring consistency and compliance.
• Monitoring, Logging & Observability: Implement and maintain dashboards, alerts, and log pipelines using enterprise observability tools to ensure system transparency and rapid diagnosis.
• Operational Automation: Develop and enhance runbooks, automate repeatable workflows, reduce manual toil, and improve operational efficiency.
• SLA, SLO, and Reliability Improvements: Track key reliability metrics, enforce operational standards, and drive continuous optimization to meet or exceed service commitments.
• Change Management: Support change reviews, evaluate operational risks, ensure compliance with WK change processes, and validate operational readiness for all changes.
• Security & Compliance Alignment: Ensure adherence to security standards, support vulnerability remediation efforts, and maintain compliance with organizational policies.
• CrossFunctional Collaboration: Partner with Engineering, CloudOps, Security, Compliance, and other teams to resolve issues, improve service quality, and enhance application resilience.

OTHER DUTIES

• Performs other duties as assigned by management.
• On call rotation responsibilities with the Service Delivery and Operations Team
  

Requirements

Technical Requirements

• Advanced expertise in operating applications on Azure and/or AWS, including networking, load balancers, DNS, certificates, storage, and messaging services. Strong knowledge of application operations in cloud environments (Azure/AWS).
• Hands-on with observability stacks (Datadog, Grafana/Prometheus, ELK/OpenSearch, Open Telemetry) and alert engineering.
• Experience with incident management, RCA, and operational troubleshooting.
• Strong practical understanding of CI/CD concepts and collaboration with release teams; experience validating releases in lower/production environments.
• Familiarity with infrastructure components: load balancers, storage networking, DNS and certificates.
• Proficiency in automation and scripting (PowerShell, Bash, Python) to build runbooks, health checks, and remediation workflows.
• Experience with deployment strategies (blue/green, rolling, canary) and traffic management.
• Security and compliance in operations: vulnerability remediation, secrets and key management, audit readiness.
• Ability to interpret logs, metrics, traces, and performance data.
• Experience managing multi-environment application lifecycles (Dev, QA, UAT, Prod).
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform (modules, workspaces), Azure ARM/Bicep or AWS CloudFormation; policy-as-code and environment drift detection.
  

Functional Requirements

• Ability to ensure 24x7 application reliability and operational excellence.
• Manage end-to-end application lifecycle including deployments, configurations, and environment health.
• Collaborate with engineering, CloudOps, and Security teams to ensure smooth operations.
• Own operational KPIs such as uptime, MTTR, change success rate, and SLA/SLO adherence.
• Perform release coordination, deployment validation, and post-release monitoring.
• Lead incident response, communication, and escalation handling.
• Participate in change management and risk assessments for all application changes.
• Maintain runbooks, SOPs, and operational documentation.
• Drive continuous improvement for operational workflows and process maturity.
• Support audit, compliance, and security requirements for applications.
  

Job Experience

8-10 Years

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Systems, or a related field.
• Vendor certifications preferred: Azure Administrator/Architect or AWS SysOps/DevOps Professional; ITIL Foundation (or higher).
• Terraform Associate/Professional (or equivalent IaC certification) preferred; SRE Foundation a plus.
• Proven experience leading incident response, conducting RCAs, and implementing preventative controls.
• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and mentoring skills in global, fast-paced environments.
• Strong understanding of Software Engineering Principals
• Industry recognized Kubernetes Certification.
  

Thought Leadership and Soft skills:

• Strong ownership mindset with a bias for automation, measurement, and continuous improvement.
• Ability to translate technical risks and trade-offs into business language for decision-makers.
  

#LI-Hybrid

Our Interview Practices

To maintain a fair and genuine hiring process, we kindly ask that all candidates participate in interviews without the assistance of AI tools or external prompts. Our interview process is designed to assess your individual skills, experiences, and communication style. We value authenticity and want to ensure we're getting to know you-not a digital assistant. To help maintain this integrity, we ask to remove virtual backgrounds and include in-person interviews in our hiring process. Please note that use of AI-generated responses or third-party support during interviews will be grounds for disqualification from the recruitment process.

Applicants may be required to appear onsite at a Wolters Kluwer office as part of the recruitment process.

Compensation:

$118,300.00 - $207,400.00 USDThis role is eligible for Bonus.

Compensation range listed is based on primary location of the position. Actual base salary offer is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skills, experience and actual hiring location. Your recruiter can share more information about the specific offer for the job location during the hiring process.

Additional Information:

Wolters Kluwer offers a wide variety of competitive benefits and programs to help meet your needs and balance your work and personal life, including but not limited to: Medical, Dental, & Vision Plans, 401(k), FSA/HSA, Commuter Benefits, Tuition Assistance Plan, Vacation and Sick Time, and Paid Parental Leave. Full details of our benefits are available upon request.