Support Engineer III

About the Job:

Provide advanced domain-specific technical support to our customers, with an understanding of partnering domains. Represents voice of the customer, finding pain points for customers in their domain. Help with troubleshooting and resolving customer-facing incidents and requests related to technology products and services in a domain. Activities include working on issues of greater complexity that require more advanced analysis and troubleshooting. Actively contributing both updating and creating knowledge for our customers.

What You'll Do:

• Follow customer support processes and best practices to open and resolve customer incidents and requests. Property documents incident details including customer perceived issue, customer goal, incident type, business application, work updates, and resolution notes. Consistently links incidents worked on to the problem record for the issue.
• Respond to customer inquiries and provide prompt expert solutions to their complex technical issues. Help customers in a professional and empathetic manner.
• Analyze and diagnose common and moderately complex issues. Effectively use knowledge bases and provided troubleshooting tools to provided solutions or workarounds. Independently contribute to the knowledge base by both creating and updating support articles to improve resolution of issues.
• Based on incident trends for customer pain points, proactively creates new and updates existing knowledge articles for both customers and support teams.
• Shows consistent technical knowledge and business acumen of the applications and services supported. Has relevant business and technical knowledge of partnering domains and their integrated systems.
• Represents voice of the customer for their domain, finding and communicating customer pain points. Champion for technology needs of customers and proactively finds issues affecting them. Work across domains and teams to engage on the resolution of issues.
• Collaborates with the team in addressing escalated customer incidents from engagement, communication, and resolution.
• Finds recurring customer-facing trends and pain points in the incidents they work on. Collaborates with team members to support the problem management process by opening problem records when paint points are found.
• Understands the roles and responsibilities of different support levels and knows when to elevate incidents. Collaborates with cross-functional teams, including Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 (engineering), to escalate and coordinate the resolution of issues.
• Collaborates with team members to implement enterprise best practices, while driving efficient incident resolution.
• Performs incident analysis of all customer incidents in their domain and is familiar with all problem records in their domain. Links incidents to the right problem record and opens new problem records when a trend is not yet documented.

What You'll Bring to the Role:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information technology, management information systems, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years of mainframe application development and support experience.
• 3-5 years of insurance application development and support experience.
• 2+ years of software engineering, debugging, analysis, and documentation experience.
• Experience providing technical or nontechnical customer support using industry standards and a customer-focused approach.
• Knowledge of automation, ITIL practices, and tools such as ServiceNow, Zendesk, Dynatrace, and ELK.
• Experience collaborating with offshore support resources, business teams, and digital product teams.
• Strong technical and business aptitude, including the ability to analyze and resolve application and technology issues.
• General understanding of application architecture, system integration, software development, deployment methods, and release management.
• Proficiency with Agile methodologies and Jira for planning and work management.
• Strong written and verbal communication, interpersonal, and problem-solving skills.
• Self-motivated and able to work independently in a collaborative environment with limited direction.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity, take ownership, and advocate for the customer.
• Commitment to continuous learning and expanding technical and business knowledge.

Skills you have:

• Incident, Problem, & Knowledge Management- Responds to crises or urgent situations within a domain to mitigate immediate and potential threats; uses mitigation, preparedness, and response and recovery approaches to manage issues and restore services. Applies problem solving methods to identify and understand problems, conduct root cause analysis, and resolve issues. Documents and shares findings to achieve faster incident resolution, provide consistent customer experiences, and provide a blueprint for continuous improvement.
• Domain Expertise- Provides solutions and support in decision making based on the expertise in a particular domain with in-depth knowledge of methodologies, features, best practices, and limitations. Communicates insights and opportunities from a dataset, using narratives, visualizations, and analysis.
• Customer Support- Captures customer information for inquiry and analysis in an organized, clear, and consistent manner; leverages knowledge of trends affecting customer to help them make informed decisions and communicates with the customer and the field. Uses customer intelligence to solve problems, demonstrate patience and understanding, ensure customer satisfaction by knowing the customer and audience and resolve customer complaints efficiently.
• Customer Centricity- Applies a customer first mindset to design and continuously improve solutions, systems, processes, and services that support enterprise strategy, impact critical business outcomes, and drive organizational success.
• Software Problem Solving- Conducts in-depth analysis of technology needs, issues, and roadblocks within assigned scope, applies experience and expertise to apply best practices, explore the “art of possible”, and deliver blueprints for the most effective and efficient solutions. Detects and removes existing and potential errors in software code or a system that can cause it to behave unexpectedly or operate incorrectly. Leverages common software tools/debuggers and logical thinking for root causing issue.
• IT Service Management- Develops and implements the ITSM (IT Service Management) roadmap through a structured methodology consisting of best practices for strategizing, defining, designing, planning, delivering, and supporting IT services. Implements industry leading framework, ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library).
• Cross Functional Partnering & Planning- Facilitates collaboration, communication, coordination, and planning with individuals and teams from different functions within the organization, and who have different areas of expertise, to achieve common goals.

#LI-Hybrid

Compensation Range:

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Geographic Specific Pay Structure:

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We believe in fairness and transparency. It’s why we share the salary range for most of our roles. However, final salaries are based on a number of factors, including the skills and experience of the candidate; the current market; location of the candidate; and other factors uncovered in the hiring process. The standard pay structure is listed but if you’re living in California, New York City or other eligible location, geographic specific pay structures, compensation and benefits could be applicable, click here to learn more.

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Northwestern Mutual is an equal opportunity employer that welcomes talented individuals of all backgrounds. We are committed to creating and maintaining an environment in which each employee can contribute creative ideas, seek challenges, assume leadership and continue to focus on meeting and exceeding business and personal objectives.