Today
Secret
Unspecified
Unspecified
(On-Site/Office)
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
Event & Observability Management
Change, Release & Configuration Control
Problem & Availability Management
Service Level Management & Reporting
Security & Compliance
Knowledge & Documentation
Requirements
Minimum Qualifications (Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities)
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
PHYSICAL DEMANDS AND WORK ENVIRONMENT
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform these functions.
While performing the duties of this position, the employee is regularly required to talk or hear. The employee frequently is required to use hands or fingers, handle or feel objects, tools, or controls. The employee is occasionally required to stand; walk; sit; and reach with hands and arms. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this position include close vision, distance vision, and the ability to adjust focus. The noise level in the work environment is usually low to moderate.
Northern Technologies Group is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, age, or any other protected status under federal, state, or local law.
Travel
10%
Shift
Normal office hours that align with the core hours of the customer
NOTE
This job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice. Employees will be required to follow any other job-related instructions and to perform any other job-related duties requested by any person authorized to give instructions or assignments. This document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an "at will" relationship.
The salary range listed represents a good faith estimate and is provided in compliance with applicable pay transparency laws. The final compensation offered will be determined based on a variety of factors, including your skills, experience, qualifications, internal equity, and market conditions.
Salary Description
$140,000 to $175,000
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 experience supporting the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) or other DoD agencies.
- Familiarity with DevOps or application lifecycle management practices.
PHYSICAL DEMANDS AND WORK ENVIRONMENT
The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform these functions.
While performing the duties of this position, the employee is regularly required to talk or hear. The employee frequently is required to use hands or fingers, handle or feel objects, tools, or controls. The employee is occasionally required to stand; walk; sit; and reach with hands and arms. The employee must occasionally lift and/or move up to 25 pounds. Specific vision abilities required by this position include close vision, distance vision, and the ability to adjust focus. The noise level in the work environment is usually low to moderate.
Northern Technologies Group is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, age, or any other protected status under federal, state, or local law.
Travel
10%
Shift
Normal office hours that align with the core hours of the customer
NOTE
This job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties, responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without notice. Employees will be required to follow any other job-related instructions and to perform any other job-related duties requested by any person authorized to give instructions or assignments. This document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an "at will" relationship.
The salary range listed represents a good faith estimate and is provided in compliance with applicable pay transparency laws. The final compensation offered will be determined based on a variety of factors, including your skills, experience, qualifications, internal equity, and market conditions.
Salary Description
$140,000 to $175,000
group id: 10432548
