Lead Application Engineer — COTS Portfolio, Azure and AWS...

This is a lead role for someone who does not want to stop being an engineer. You would own the technical quality of a team's output across a portfolio of commercial applications, and the requirement is explicit that a meaningful share of your time — roughly twenty to forty per cent — stays hands-on, so you remain credible and can unblock people yourself.

The estate is a mixture: server applications on Windows and Linux, .NET and Java stacks, SQL Server behind IIS web applications, and a growing amount of cloud configuration across Azure and AWS. Identity work is a constant theme, and there is early work on integrating AI capability into the commercial applications.

What you would be doing

• Coordinate, deploy and manage server applications running on Windows and Linux.
• Own the technical quality of the team's output, and keep a real hands-on share of the work.
• Manage identity groups and roles, and configure cloud components across Azure and AWS.
• Support the integration of AI capability into the commercial application portfolio.
• Coordinate support activity against the service levels, and resolve the complex issues yourself.
• Run incident logging and tracking properly, and escalate to vendors when that is genuinely the answer.
• Build the knowledge base — document what broke and what fixed it, and share it.
• Implement the security baselines and architecture patterns set by governance, and produce the compliance evidence.
• Support change, configuration, release and test management.
• Work with product owners, delivery managers and suppliers, translating technical constraints into business language.

What you would bring

• At least five years in technical delivery, including a year or more leading a team, formally or in practice.
• Strong hands-on depth in a modern stack — .NET, Java or Python, cloud, containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD, SQL and NoSQL, infrastructure as code.
• Expert knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server 2019 onwards and IIS-based web applications.
• Good knowledge of cloud deployment on both AWS and Azure, and a solid grasp of PKI and networking.
• At least four of HTML5, REST and web services, XML, SQL and VBA, plus identity integration with OAuth, OIDC or SAML2.
• Experience with IIS, JBoss or Apache Tomcat and .NET applications.
• Practical service management along ITIL lines: incident, problem, change, release.
• Demonstrated people leadership — coaching, structured feedback, and handling the difficult conversations.
• Full proficiency in English; French is an advantage.

Half of the working days each month are on site in Braine-l'Alleud.