[Hiring] Database and Application Support Engineer @DecisionPoint | Cortek

Role Description

DecisionPoint seeks a Journeyman Database and Application Support Engineer to support database availability, application operations, service restoration, component upgrades, and recovery validation for the USMEPCOM ENLIST program. The Database and Application Support Engineer will diagnose database outages, application dependencies, connection failures, unavailable services, certificate problems, and API-related issues. This role will troubleshoot incidents across database, application, middleware, server, network, cloud, and security components. This position focuses on production support, infrastructure integration, recovery, testing, and operational coordination rather than serving as the primary application developer. This position is remote, with a preference for candidates located in the Chicago area. After-hours work may be required during outages, deployments, maintenance windows, upgrades, and recovery activities.

Duties & Responsibilities

• Monitor and support the availability, performance, health, and recoverability of enterprise databases and applications.
• Review operational alerts, service failures, database errors, application errors, performance degradation, and user-reported issues.
• Diagnose database availability issues, failed services, connection failures, authentication problems, resource constraints, and performance issues.
• Analyze application dependencies across databases, servers, services, middleware, APIs, certificates, networks, cloud platforms, storage, and external interfaces.
• Troubleshoot database listeners, connection strings, connection pools, ports, drivers, service accounts, permissions, and network paths.
• Investigate failed database connections, application timeouts, unavailable services, transaction errors, and data-access problems.
• Review database, application, middleware, operating-system, web-server, API, and network logs to isolate faults.
• Use monitoring data, alerts, logs, metrics, and traces to identify the source and scope of service disruptions.
• Diagnose certificate expiration, trust-chain, hostname, binding, private-key, protocol, and encryption-related failures.
• Support certificate installation, renewal, replacement, validation, and troubleshooting for applications, databases, APIs, and supporting services.
• Diagnose REST, SOAP, API gateway, endpoint, authentication, authorization, payload, timeout, and connectivity issues.
• Validate dependencies among APIs, backend services, databases, certificates, identity providers, and network controls.
• Support approved relational database platforms and associated management, monitoring, backup, and recovery tools.
• Support application servers, web servers, middleware, schedulers, integration services, background services, and runtime components.
• Participate in Outage Response Team activities involving database or application degradation and service outages.
• Perform technical triage, gather diagnostic information, and support implementation of approved mitigation and recovery actions.
• Support development and validation of temporary workarounds when complete restoration cannot be achieved immediately.
• Maintain incident timelines covering symptoms, technical findings, actions, dependencies, communications, and restoration results.
• Escalate complex database, application, API, certificate, infrastructure, or code-related issues to senior engineers and responsible technical teams.
• Coordinate with Task 4 operations teams on infrastructure, server, network, cloud, storage, certificate, identity, and platform issues.
• Coordinate with Task 7 software teams when incidents require application-code review, defect correction, build changes, or software releases.
• Provide logs, traces, error details, reproduction steps, configuration information, and impact assessments to software teams.
• Support testing and validation of application-code corrections in applicable nonproduction and production environments.
• Confirm that implemented corrections resolve the reported issue without negatively affecting application availability, integrations, or dependencies.
• Support root-cause analysis and document technical findings, contributing factors, corrective actions, and preventive recommendations.
• Track assigned post-incident corrective actions through completion.
• Support database, application, middleware, server, appliance, and supporting-component upgrades and refreshes.
• Execute approved implementation plans, upgrade procedures, test steps, validation criteria, rollback procedures, and outage contingencies.
• Perform pre-implementation and post-implementation checks of database and application availability, connectivity, functionality, and performance.
• Support backup, restoration, replication, failover, failback, high-availability, and disaster-recovery activities.
• Validate database and application recovery following outages, maintenance, migrations, restorations, or continuity events.
• Test service dependencies and end-to-end transaction paths after restoration or component upgrades.
• Support capacity, performance, availability, and resource-utilization analysis.
• Apply or coordinate approved operating-system, database, middleware, application, vendor, firmware, and security updates.
• Support remediation of vulnerabilities, IAVAs, CND Directives, POA&M items, and security-control deficiencies.
• Follow approved incident, problem, change, configuration, release, availability, and service-continuity processes.
• Maintain database and application dependency diagrams, interface records, certificate inventories, configuration documentation, recovery procedures, and troubleshooting guides.
• Identify recurring issues, dependency risks, obsolete components, certificate risks, and potential points of failure.

Qualifications

• Active Secret clearance or higher.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field.
• Minimum of 6 years of relevant database support, application support, systems engineering, production operations, or enterprise IT experience.
• Demonstrated experience diagnosing database availability, application dependencies, connection failures, services, certificates, and API-related outages.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting enterprise databases and applications in a federal or Department of Defense environment.
• Experience with Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, MySQL, AWS relational database services, Azure SQL, or comparable platforms.
• Experience with database clustering, replication, backup, restoration, failover, high availability, and disaster recovery.
• Experience supporting application servers, middleware, web servers, integration platforms, schedulers, and background services.
• Experience with Microsoft Internet Information Services, Apache, Tomcat, WebLogic, JBoss, .NET, Java, or comparable technologies.
• Experience troubleshooting REST, SOAP, API gateway, authentication, authorization, payload, timeout, and endpoint-connectivity issues.
• Experience supporting TLS certificates, trust stores, keystores, certificate bindings, and Public Key Infrastructure dependencies.
• Experience using application-performance monitoring, database monitoring, logging, tracing, observability, and event-management tools.
• Experience supporting production outages, incident bridges, service restoration, root-cause analysis, and corrective-action tracking.
• Experience coordinating operational issues among infrastructure engineers, database administrators, application owners, and software-development teams.
• Experience gathering logs, traces, reproduction steps, technical findings, and impact information for code-level troubleshooting.
• Experience validating component upgrades, software releases, database changes, application fixes, and recovery procedures.
• Experience applying DISA STIGs and supporting DoD RMF, ATO, IAVA, CND Directive, vulnerability-remediation, and POA&M requirements.
• Experience using ServiceNow or a comparable ITSM platform for incident, problem, change, configuration, and release management.
• Familiarity with PowerShell, Python, SQL, Bash, or other scripting and query languages used for diagnostics and automation.
• Database, cloud, middleware, application-server, or ITIL certifications.
• Strong troubleshooting, analytical, documentation, communication, and team-collaboration skills.
• Ability to support after-hours outages, deployments, maintenance windows, upgrades, and recovery activities when required.