Manager Application Support

ASTM International is a globally recognized leader in the development and delivery of international voluntary consensus standards. Today, some 12,000 ASTM standards are used around the world to improve product quality, enhance safety, facilitate market access and trade, and build consumer confidence.

ASTM provides an excellent compensation and benefits package including:

• Undergraduate and Graduate Tuition Reimbursement
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, life and disability insurance
• Paid holidays, vacation and sick leave
• 403(b) plan with company match
• 100% company-funded defined benefits pension plan

Position Purpose

The Manager, Application Support is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day support of ASTM's custom-developed and enterprise business applications. This role supervises a team of application-focused frontline Service Desk resources and advanced Application Support Specialists who support incident management, service request fulfilment, troubleshooting, escalation, documentation, and customer-impacting issue resolution.

The Manager, Application Support serves as the day-to-day supervisor for application support activities across ASTM's support tiers. This position helps ensure that application-related issues are properly triaged, prioritized, escalated, communicated, and resolved in alignment with service expectations and business needs.

This role requires a technically capable support supervisor with experience in application support, service desk operations, customer-facing issue resolution, and code-aware troubleshooting. The ideal candidate will be comfortable supervising frontline support resources while also helping guide more complex application troubleshooting involving workflows, data, integrations, configuration, logs, scripts, SQL, or application behavior.

This position reports directly to the Senior Director of Operations.

Organization Role

• The position has supervisory responsibility for application-focused Service Desk resources and Application Support Specialists.
• The role oversees both frontline application support and advanced technical application support functions.
• The position assists in day-to-day direction and coordination across internal support teams, Customer Service, business stakeholders, Product Delivery, infrastructure teams, and external vendors.

Responsibilities

Application Support Team Management

• Manage daily operations for a team responsible for supporting ASTM custom applications and enterprise business platforms.
• Supervise application-focused Service Desk resources responsible for frontline intake, triage, initial troubleshooting, service request handling, and escalation.
• Supervise Application Support Specialists responsible for advanced troubleshooting, workflow analysis, technical investigation, documentation, and coordination with technical teams.
• Assign and prioritize daily work based on business impact, urgency, service expectations, resource capacity, and technical complexity.
• Provide coaching, feedback, mentoring, and daily direction to support team members.
• Support onboarding, training, cross-training, and skills development for assigned support resources.
• Reinforce expectations for customer service, accountability, documentation, communication, technical curiosity, and continuous improvement.

Incident Management and Service Request Fulfilment

• Oversee day-to-day application-related incidents and service requests from intake through resolution.
• Ensure tickets are properly categorized, prioritized, documented, routed, escalated, and closed.
• Monitor support queues, aging tickets, recurring issues, high-impact incidents, and escalation trends.
• Ensure timely resolution of production issues impacting ASTM staff, members, customers, and business units.
• Maintain clear escalation paths between frontline support, Application Support Specialists, Product Delivery, infrastructure teams, vendors, and business stakeholders within established support processes.
• Ensure customer-impacting issues include clear issue summaries, business impact, reproduction steps, troubleshooting notes, and resolution updates.
• Follow and reinforce consistent service management practices for incident management, service requests, escalation, and knowledge management.

Technical Escalation and Application Troubleshooting

• Serve as a day-to-day escalation point for complex or high-impact application support issues.
• Assist with troubleshooting for application errors, workflow exceptions, access issues, data inconsistencies, integration failures, configuration issues, scheduled job failures, and production defects.
• Review logs, SQL queries, scripts, configuration settings, application behavior, and support documentation to help determine root cause.
• Coordinate with Product Delivery, developers, infrastructure teams, and vendors when issues require code-level analysis, defect remediation, environment changes, or vendor intervention.
• Help determine whether issues are related to user behavior, configuration, data, application logic, infrastructure, integration, or software defects.
• Support root cause analysis for recurring incidents and escalate recommended corrective actions to the appropriate technical or product teams.
• Help translate technical findings into clear operational updates for support teams, business stakeholders, and Customer Service.

Customer Service and Business Stakeholder Coordination

• Maintain strong working relationships with Customer Service and business teams that rely on ASTM applications.
• Ensure application support teams understand the customer impact, business context, severity, and urgency of reported issues.
• Provide clear communication on incident status, next steps, risks, workarounds, and resolution timing.
• Translate technical issues into clear, business-appropriate language for non-technical stakeholders.
• Identify recurring customer pain points and escalate opportunities for process, documentation, training, or system improvements to the appropriate teams.
• Support clear communication between customer-facing teams and technical support resources.

Knowledge Management and Process Improvement

• Ensure support documentation is created, maintained, and consistently used by application support resources.
• Review and maintain knowledge base articles, troubleshooting guides, service request procedures, support runbooks, FAQs, and escalation procedures.
• Recommend opportunities to improve ticket quality, triage consistency, routing accuracy, escalation handling, and resolution efficiency.
• Promote repeatable support practices that reduce dependency on individual knowledge.
• Support self-service and frontline resolution opportunities where appropriate.
• Track recurring incidents and escalate improvement opportunities that may reduce ticket volume, improve service reliability, or strengthen customer experience.

Operational Reporting and Service Health

• Maintain visibility into support workload, ticket trends, recurring incidents, application health, and service performance.
• Prepare status updates for leadership on high-priority issues, support trends, operational risks, and improvement opportunities.
• Participate in team-level operational planning and prioritization discussions related to application support and service reliability.
• Coordinate support readiness for application changes, production releases, knowledge transfer, and new support responsibilities as directed.

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Management Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience in application support, service desk operations, production support, software support, or a related IT support function.
• Experience supporting custom-developed applications, web applications, enterprise business systems, or integrated software platforms.
• Prior team lead, supervisor, or emerging manager experience in an application support, service desk, software support, IT operations, or related technical support environment.
• Experience supporting applications built with one or more modern application technologies such as .NET, Java/Spring Boot, PHP, React, SQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, or comparable platforms.
• Practical understanding of incident management, service request fulfillment, ticket triage, escalation management, and customer-impacting production support.
• Ability to assist or guide technical troubleshooting involving application workflows, logs, SQL queries, scripts, configurations, data issues, integrations, or software defects.
• Working knowledge of the software development lifecycle and how production support issues transition into defects, enhancements, or development work.
• Experience using ticketing, issue tracking, or collaboration tools such as Jira, Jira Service Management, Zendesk, Confluence, Freshdesk, Zoho, or similar platforms.
• Strong customer service orientation, communication skills, organization, analytical thinking, and problem-solving ability.

Preferred Qualifications and Competencies

• Experience with technical troubleshooting across application, database, integration, or web application layers.
• Experience with SaaS administration, eCommerce platforms, identity and access management, middleware, reporting platforms, ERP systems, or customer-facing web applications.
• Familiarity with DevOps practices, deployment pipelines, version control, automated deployments, or tools such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins, Git, Bitbucket, or similar platforms.
• Familiarity with cloud-hosted and on-premises application environments.
• Experience working with Agile teams, product delivery teams, development backlogs, or production defect management.
• Experience building or maintaining support documentation, runbooks, knowledge base articles, service catalog procedures, or troubleshooting guides.
• Familiarity with ITIL practices; ITIL Foundation or similar certification is a plus.
• Relevant technical certifications such as CompTIA, Microsoft, AWS, Azure, ITIL, or similar credentials are a plus.

Physical Demands and Work Environment

This position is remote-based, with work performed primarily from a home office or another suitable professional work environment. The role may be associated with ASTM's West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania office, but regular onsite attendance is not required unless directed for business needs, meetings, training, or other organizational purposes.

The employee must be able to perform standard computer-based work, including prolonged periods of sitting or standing, using a computer, participating in virtual meetings, communicating by phone or video, and reviewing digital information. Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the role.

This job description is not intended to provide an all-inclusive listing of related job activities. Associates may be requested by management to perform other related activities in place of or in addition to those representative activities noted in this job description.