Job Description

About the Agency:

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation (HPD) promotes quality and affordability in the city’s housing, and diversity and strength in the city’s neighborhoods because every New Yorker deserves a safe, affordable place to live in a neighborhood they love.

- We maintain building and resident safety and health.
- We create opportunities for New Yorkers through housing affordability.
- We engage New Yorkers to build and sustain neighborhood strength and diversity.

HPD is entrusted with fulfilling these objectives through the goals and strategies of Housing Our Neighbors: A Blueprint for Housing and Homelessness, Mayor Adams’ comprehensive housing framework. To support this important work, the administration has committed $5 billion in new capital funding, bringing the 10-year planned investment in housing to $22 billion the largest in the city’s history. This investment, coupled with a commitment to reduce administrative and regulatory barriers, is a multi-pronged strategy to tackle New York City’s complex housing crisis, by addressing homelessness and housing instability, promoting economic stability and mobility, increasing homeownership opportunities, improving health and safety, and increasing opportunities for equitable growth.


Your Team:

Housing Preservation & Development Technology (HPD Tech) is the IT division within HPD. The Office of HPD Tech leads the agency’s effort to transform HPD through technology by promoting productivity and eliminating manual processing, shrinking costs, and increasing the pace of work. HPD Tech works to improve effectiveness of business processes using core applications for flawless execution. HPD Tech empowers decision makers with access to quality (complete and accurate) information to anticipate and pro-actively react to building, neighborhood and market conditions.

The Office of HPDTech is composed of 7 units: CIO, CTO (Chief Technology Office), CPO (Chief Product Office), Budget, Enterprise Architecture, Planning & Compliance, and Information Security.

Your Impact:
Under the supervision of the Release and Service Management Executive Director, within the unit of Enterprise Architecture, as the Product Support Specialist for the Division of HPD Tech, you will directly work with Application Development team to assist with Product Application, Batch Jobs debugging and resolving issues.

Your Role:

As a Product Support Specialist, your role will be to provide support to set up/configure new application environment, verify environment with Bill of Materials, application deployment, application configuration, monitor run batch hobs, run print jobs, manually print different types of letters, run mainframe jobs, manage mainframe and other application access requests, and provide production support including Incident Management, Service Management, Support Web Application Suites, APIs, Batch jobs or other production support related tasks. You will be tasked with working as incident manager during major outage and monitor essential application and batch jobs. You will be responsible to provide support to the development and other team in order to debug incidents. Also, you will be responsible for communications with Office of Technology and Innovation as well as other sister agencies, and collaboration with multiple teams and will be managing multiple environments.

The key strategy for product support manager revolves around automation tools to allow management of a larger enterprise footprint. The team uses a combination of in-house and industry-standard tools for configuration and application deployment solutions. The team provides significant value-add during the release process, and ensure quality software delivered in a timely manner. The candidate should be able to work together with the team and be a team player.


Your Responsibilities:

- Provide support for Application Incidents and service requests.
- Provide initial triage of service requests and determine if additional IT resources should be engaged to fulfill them.
- Work as Incident Manager for major/high-impact applications failure incidents – Open Incident Bridge, reach out to multiple teams (within or outside Agency)- Product Team, Network Support, Application Tech Team, QA Team, and Operations Team etc.
- Configure Application Environment, Dev, QA, UAT, PROD.
- Verify Bill of Material, Software, Hardware, IIS, Connectivity between multiple network hops.
- Assist development team to configure new application deployment, debug existing application issues.
- Application deployment manually or via automated process (Azure Pipeline).
- Manage Deployment Events.
- Run Mainframe batch jobs manually that are schedule on Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and Quarterly basis.
- Support Access Management for Mainframe (TAS, PTS etc.), State (WMS), and other city agency provided systems.
- Run mandated and nonmandated Print batch Jobs, Print Letters in high volume, boxing, and all related task until the letters are picked up by the vendors.
- Analyze, diagnose, test, and resolve basic to moderate service desk end-user issues and problems.
- Monitor Applications and Batch Jobs.
- Provide essential communications, advice, and support.
- Provide solutions to incidents, service requests, problems, and queries.
- Expedite reported issues affecting end-users with team members and management.
- Keep end-user abreast of current incident and service request status.
- Document support issues and resolutions.
- Create weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly Dashboards and KPI reports.
- Monitor, track, and analyze incident trends and recommend user-training programs.
- Implement, and oversee HPDTech Service Management policies and procedures, ensuring consistent service levels.
- This position will include all the incumbents’ duties. Responsibilities may require employee to report to the office daily and fulfill evening/weekend hours to meet deadlines.

Required Skills:

- Minimum 4+ years of hands-on experience with Application Production Support.
- Minimum 3+ years of experience with Jira or similar service desk tools (i.e., Service Now, Remedy Service Desk, Zendesk etc.) for managing helpdesk tickets.
- Working knowledge of MS IIS, Desktop, and web-based applications.
- Experience with prioritizing multi-tasking and efficiently managing resources.
- Must be able work with multiple teams (i.e., development, database, infrastructure, and project management etc.) and work as a liaison between them for resolution.
- Experience working with other agencies (outside your own), third party venders, and service providers to coordinate the incident and problem resolution.
- Ability to jump into incident calls involving other agencies and third parties.
- Solid understanding of the needs of customers/users and represents this in their work prioritization, effort, and where needed escalation.
- Knowledge of technical documentation.
- Ability to communicate technical information effectively with internal and external vendors.
- Must be able to work outside the business hours (including evening, weekend) to provide support for the incident response(s) if needed.
- Ability to be on the top of the reported incidents\issues and provide support within the established SLA.
- Ability to multi-task and prioritize workflow.
- Solid written and verbal communication skills.
- Must be self-motivated, detail oriented, be able to work effectively in a team environment.
- Strive for continuous improvement for yourself and your team.
- Experience with IIS, REST API, Dockers, Redis real-time database and Automate scheduler is huge plus.
- Experience with version control systems (TFS, GIT a plus).

Preferred Skills:

- Knowledge of Windows OS, Office 365, MS Task Scheduler, IIS, Automate Server.
- Demonstrate understanding of different software development life-cycle methodologies.
- Experience with IT assents and inventory management.
- Excellent communication skills.
- Ability to work well and communicate effectively with technology and other business users.
- Good team player with a strong willingness to participate and help others.
- Support orientated; able to manage customer’s expectations and follow up accordingly.
- Able to prioritize in a fast moving, high pressure, constantly changing environment, good sense of urgency.


NOTE: Only those candidates under consideration will be contacted. This position is open to applicants who filed for an exam or those who are already permanent in the Computer Associate Operations title.

Please indicate in your cover letter whether you have filed for an exam or are already permanent in the Computer Associate Operations title. Applicants who filed for an exam will be required to produce a copy of their Order Confirmation Receipt at time of interview for verification.

This position may be eligible for remote work up to 2 days per week, pursuant to the Remote Work Pilot Program agreed to between the City and various unions.

Qualifications

1. A certificate from an accredited technical school (approximately 675 hours) with a specialization in computer operations, and two years of satisfactory full-time computer operations experience, in a large-scale networked, multi- tiered, or mainframe computer environment, or two years of satisfactory data communications network experience working in a mainframe or multi-tiered computer environment; or

2. A baccalaureate degree from an accredited college or university and three years of satisfactory full-time experience as described in "1" above; or

3. A four-year high school diploma or its educational equivalent and four years of satisfactory full-time experience as described
in "1" above; or

4. A satisfactory combination of education and/or experience equivalent to "1", "2",or "3" above. However, all candidates must have at least two years of full-time experience as described in "1" above