The NRLA: Who we are
The UK's largest membership organisation for private residential landlords, the National Residential Landlords Association (NRLA) supports and represents more than 100,000 members across England and Wales.
Created by landlords, for landlords, it offers investors everything they need to run a successful and compliant lettings business, whether they are full-time property professionals running large portfolios or accidental landlords with a single let.
The NRLA is a trusted ally, on hand to guide members through the complex regulatory environment, with all the essential documents and guidance needed to run a successful and fully compliant business.
A truly member-first organisation, innovation is at the heart of what we do and have invested in and developed new proptech solutions for members, including the acquisition of property safety certification firm Safe2 and the development of the property management system Portfolio.
A dynamic and fast-paced organisation, the NRLA is a great place to work, and it is not just us saying that; we have Investors in People Gold status to prove it. The association was also named one of the best companies to work for in the UK in a list compiled by The Sunday Times.
Our enthusiastic and ambitious staff work out of offices in Central Manchester and Central London, with hybrid working options available. Colleagues typically work from home four days a week, with one day in the office.
We are looking for colleagues who are professional, adaptable, and innovative. In return, we offer an inclusive and creative working environment with attractive options for training and career development, and a competitive salary and benefits package.
The NRLA package:
25 days annual leave increasing to 26 days with three years’ service, 27 days with five years’ service and 28 days with seven years’ service
Additional annual day off for your birthday
Salary exchange Pension scheme
Life assurance
Cash plan health and wellbeing benefit including Employee Assistance Programme and counselling service
Sick pay
Cycle purchase loans, season tickets loans and interest-free staff loans
Complimentary NRLA membership
Non-contractual annual performance-related bonus scheme
Enhanced maternity and paternity pay
Location:
Remote, with occasional travel to NRLA offices and partner sites as required
Key Relationships:
Customer Contact Centre (1st line support)
Product and Engineering teams (Portfolio and Safe2)
Third-party development and integration partners (including Taxd, Money Hub, Stripe and Safe2 B2B clients)
Internal business stakeholders across Operations, Membership and Commercial
NRLA members
Main Purpose & Scope of Job:
The 2nd Line Application Support Analyst is the technical safety net for the NRLA’s two member-facing platforms: Portfolio (the property management platform, including Portfolio First, Portfolio Plus and Portfolio Pro) and Safe2 (the property compliance certificate service).
The role investigates, reproduces and resolves the complex issues that cannot be handled at first line. It owns the technical investigation, the data fix, the bug write-up that goes to development, and the post-incident review that stops the same issue happening again.
Both platforms hold financially and legally significant data — transaction records that feed Making Tax Digital submissions through Portfolio, and compliance certificates that protect members and tenants through Safe2. The role demands a methodical, evidence-led approach: every fix is traceable, every escalation reproducible, and every recurring issue surfaces to Product and Engineering as a problem statement, not a ticket count.
The role works closely with the Customer Contact Centre, the Product and Engineering teams, third-party development partners, and the B2B Safe2 clients whose contractual SLAs depend on this function performing well.
Duties & Key Responsibilities
Application support — Portfolio and Safe2:
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Act as the second-line escalation point for the Customer Contact Centre on all Portfolio and Safe2 tickets, taking ownership the moment first-line hands over.
- Reproduce reported issues against test and production environments before escalating to development, ensuring every dev-bound ticket includes steps to reproduce, environment, expected versus actual behaviour, evidence (screenshots or screen recording) and impacted user or property records.
- Diagnose issues across web applications, APIs, integrations, workflows and user accounts. For Portfolio this includes Open Banking feeds (Money Hub), payment processing (Stripe), the Taxd MTD integration, e-signature workflows and the property-tenancy-tenant data model. For Safe2 this includes engineer scheduling, certificate generation, B2B partner integrations and bulk order processing.
- Investigate using logs, monitoring tools, database queries and ticket history. Confirm the root cause before raising a defect — distinguish between bugs, configuration issues, data issues, user error and feature gaps.
- Maintain visibility of platform health, performance and service availability, escalating proactively when leading indicators suggest a member-facing issue is forming.
- Coordinate the day-to-day workload and priorities ensuring consistent standards and coverage across all second line escalations.
Triage, prioritisation and SLA management:
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Triage every escalation against a defined priority scale that reflects member and business impact, not technical complexity. Priority is set by how many members are affected, whether the issue blocks a regulatory deadline (Making Tax Digital quarterly windows, Renters’ Rights Act compliance, Safe2 certificate expiry), and whether financial or compliance data is at risk.
- Maintain accurate, complete and current ticket records in Jira Service Management. Investigation notes, decisions, comms with members and resolution details must be captured to the standard required for audit, complaint handling and post-incident review.
- Recognise major incidents early and invoke the major incident process: nominate an incident lead, open the comms bridge, agree the member message with Customer Support and product owners, and run the post-incident review within five working days.
Data integrity and operational fixes:
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Perform controlled data corrections on Portfolio and Safe2 records where a user-driven fix is not possible. All data changes must follow a change log convention: ticket reference, before/after values, business reason, requester, executor and timestamp. No silent edits.
- Support user administration, permissions and account management across both platforms, including resolving the periodic conflicts between NRLA member accounts, Portfolio subscriptions and HgBook records.
Release validation and change management:
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Validate releases, hotfixes and configuration changes in collaboration with the development teams. Confirm that fixes resolve the original issue, do not introduce regressions, and behave correctly across the relevant Portfolio tiers (First, Plus, Pro) and Safe2 service types.
- Participate in user acceptance testing for major releases, with a particular focus on areas of known sensitivity: Portfolio finance and Open Banking, MTD submission flows, e-signature tenancy creation, Safe2 booking and engineer allocation, and B2B bulk order processing.
- Run controlled re-tests on closed tickets after a release to confirm member-reported issues are genuinely resolved before notifying the member.
Trend analysis and continuous improvement:
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Hold the analytical view of what is going wrong across both platforms and where. Produce a weekly support trends summary covering top issues by volume, top issues by member impact, recurring defects, and emerging patterns that have not yet generated formal incidents.
- Feed those trends into Product and Engineering as problem statements: not “we had 15 tickets about X”, but “here is the user journey that breaks, here is the underlying cause, here is what good would look like.”
- Track repeat incidents and recurring root causes, ensuring genuinely ‘fixed’ means fixed at source, not papered over.
Knowledge management and support enablement:
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Own and maintain the 2nd line runbook — the technical playbook for known issues, common diagnostic steps, data correction procedures and escalation routes.
- Contribute to the Portfolio and Safe2 knowledge base used by the Customer Contact Centre, ensuring articles reflect current platform behaviour after every release.
- Brief the Customer Contact Centre on known issues, workarounds and release changes so first line can resolve more at the first contact and set accurate expectations with members.
Stakeholder and partner communication:
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Communicate technical issues in plain language to non-technical stakeholders, including members, internal teams and senior leadership.
- Provide proactive, accurate updates during incidents — the standard is ‘what we know, what we don’t, what we’re doing, when we’ll update next’, never radio silence.
- Partner with Product, Engineering and third-party development partners as the operational voice of what members are actually experiencing.
What success looks like:
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Member-facing issues are resolved at the first technically viable point, with clear evidence, a documented fix and a verified outcome.
- Defects raised to Engineering are reproducible, well-scoped and quickly actionable — the development team trusts the ticket without needing to re-investigate.
- B2B Safe2 SLAs are met consistently and the relationships are operationally healthy.
- Recurring incidents reduce quarter on quarter because root causes are surfaced and fixed at source.
- The Customer Contact Centre resolves more at first contact because the knowledge base, runbooks and briefings keep pace with the platforms.
Technologies And Tools:
Jira Service Management; Puzzel (telephony and contact centre platform); SQL databases; Postman; Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365; cloud-hosted web applications; monitoring, logging and observability platforms including Sentry and Power BI; the Portfolio platform (built in-house) and Safe2 platform (Laravel-based, currently undergoing cloud migration).
Person Specification
Skills & Abilities (Essential):
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Demonstrable experience in a 2nd line Application Support, Technical Support or Product Support role for a customer-facing SaaS or web application.
- Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, with the discipline to reproduce issues before escalating.
- Confident reading application logs, querying databases (SQL) and using monitoring and observability platforms to investigate root cause.
- Working understanding of REST APIs, authentication flows, third-party integrations and modern web technologies.
- Experience using ticketing and service management platforms (Jira Service Management or equivalent) to a high standard of documentation.
- Able to triage and prioritise based on customer and business impact, not just technical interest.
- Strong written and verbal communication — capable of explaining a technical issue to a non-technical member and a technical fix to a development team.
- Comfortable working across multiple products, partners and stakeholder groups simultaneously.
Desirable:
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Experience supporting financial or regulated data, where data corrections require an audit trail.
- Familiarity with cloud-hosted environments (AWS, Azure, GCP) and Laravel or similar PHP applications.
- Experience with monitoring and observability tools such as Sentry, Datadog or equivalent, and reporting tools such as Power BI.
- Understanding of DevOps practices and release management, including controlled deployment and rollback.
- Experience working in an ITIL-aligned support environment, particularly around incident, problem and change management.
- Experience of API testing tools such as Postman.
- Exposure to the private rented sector, property management, or compliance certification workflows.
Experience:
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Significant time spent in a 2nd line role for a live customer-facing platform, not just internal IT support.
- Track record of reducing repeat incidents through root cause analysis and proactive product feedback.
Knowledge:
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Working knowledge of incident, problem and change management principles.
- Working knowledge of GDPR and the practical implications of handling member, tenant and engineer personal data.
- Familiarity with property management software, compliance certification, Making Tax Digital, or Open Banking workflows would be an advantage but is not essential — the platforms can be learned.
Personal Attributes and other requirements:
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Methodical and detail-oriented — will not escalate a ticket they have not properly understood.
- Calm under pressure during incidents and major outages.
- Customer-focused, with an instinct to protect the member or B2B partner experience even when the platform is misbehaving.
- Comfortable working both independently and as part of a small, busy support team.
- Strong sense of ownership and accountability — closes the loop rather than passes the parcel.
- Proactive in identifying improvements to platforms, processes and the support function itself.
A dynamic and fast-paced organisation, the NRLA is a great place to work, and it is not just us saying that, we have Investors in People Gold status to prove it. The association was also named one of the best companies to work for in the UK in a list compiled by The Sunday Times. Our enthusiastic and ambitious staff work out of offices in Central Manchester and Central London with hybrid working options available. Colleagues typically work from home four days a week with one day in the office. We are looking for colleagues who are professional, adaptable, and innovative. In return we offer an inclusive and creative working environment with attractive options for training and career development and a competitive salary and benefits package.
