Applications Specialist

Role Overview

The Applications Specialist position at Liberty & Heritage Insurance is dedicated to delivering expert technical support and managing the lifecycle of enterprise business applications throughout the organization. The role focuses on maintaining the performance, security, and availability of insurance-related IT systems and ensuring continuous enhancement aligned with business goals, following ITIL best practices.

Primary Responsibilities

• Deliver application support services meeting defined service level agreements (SLAs) across the business.
• Provide first and second level support for all enterprise systems to ensure uninterrupted operation.
• Maintain business-critical system uptime by adhering to agreed availability targets.
• Implement and manage monitoring tools that provide accurate and timely performance metrics and other vital data.
• Administer and maintain enterprise systems, ensuring they are appropriately scaled to meet operational demands.
• Document and regularly update operational processes and procedures related to enterprise applications.
• Support key operational periods including month-end, year-end, claims processing, policy renewals, and financial reporting cycles.
• Manage deployment of application upgrades, patches, and code releases across multiple environments such as SIT, QA, staging, and production, enforcing compliance with change management protocols.
• Coordinate User Acceptance Testing (UAT), integration, performance testing, and deployment readiness.
• Drive process improvements by leveraging data analytics, adopting new technology, and implementing continuous improvement strategies.
• Apply ITIL methodologies to enhance service delivery areas including incident, problem, change, and service request management and ensure continual service improvement.
• Promote adoption of modern development practices such as DevOps, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), and automation to improve deployment efficiency and system reliability.

Key Performance Indicators

• High customer satisfaction levels.
• Decrease in recurring issues through effective problem management.
• Compliance with vendor SLAs and timely issue resolution.
• Number of delivered process improvement initiatives.
• Consistent system availability.

Educational and Professional Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Telecommunication Engineering, or a related field from an accredited institution.
• Relevant professional certifications, including but not limited to: Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate, Microsoft Certified DevOps Engineer Expert, Professional Scrum Developer (PSD), and Microsoft Applied Skills: Querying Data with Transact-SQL.

Additional Advantageous Experience

• Experience with containerization and cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Expertise in solutions architecture and system integration.
• Familiarity with data platforms including SQL and NoSQL databases, business analytics, and data migration techniques.

Experience Requirement

A minimum of four years’ professional experience in a high-demand business systems environment is required.

Technical Skills and Knowledge

• Experienced with web and application servers like Apache, IIS, Apache Tomcat, JBoss, WebSphere, and WebLogic.
• Knowledgeable in data warehousing, business analytics, business system modeling, and data retrieval methods.
• Skilled in the end-to-end lifecycle of cloud-based application design, development, deployment, and support.
• Familiar with ITIL governance standards.
• Proficient in SQL and NoSQL databases, encompassing data modeling, migration, and quality management.
• Capable in developing and maintaining web services, REST APIs, middleware solutions, microservices, and enterprise system integrations.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, release management, infrastructure automation, and containerization technologies.
• Understanding of IT security principles and deployment of security appliances.

Core Competencies

• Delivering quality results and meeting customer expectations.
• Networking and relationship building.
• Team collaboration and interpersonal skills.
• Adaptability to change.
• Effective planning and organizational abilities.
• Strong communication and presentation talents.
• Persuasion and influence skills.
• Leadership and supervisory capabilities.
• Integrity and adherence to values.
• Achievement of personal work objectives.

Additional Information

Liberty Kenya values diversity and is an equal opportunity employer. Personal data submitted will be used solely for recruitment purposes and handled according to the company’s data privacy statement. Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.