[Hiring] Senior Application Support Engineer @Zact Inc.

Role Description

We are building out a dedicated Application Support function for our commercial card and payments platform — a GCP-hosted, microservices-based SaaS product used by banking clients. This Senior Application Support Engineer will be the technical anchor of that team, leading a team of two junior analysts.

This is an investigative, system-thinking, and automation-first role. You will own complex incident triage end-to-end, build the monitoring and alerting foundation, and systematically automate the repetitive tasks that slow support teams down. You will also be the primary technical point of contact for banking client escalations and the person who builds the knowledge infrastructure the whole team runs on.

What You'll Own

• Incident leadership & triage
  • Lead triage of complex, multi-service incidents — from first signal to root cause, with a documented timeline throughout.
  • Use GCP Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, and distributed tracing to trace failures across microservice boundaries.
  • Write MySQL queries to investigate transaction, card, and account data issues in production read replicas — following strict change-control at all times.
  • Own post-incident reviews (PIRs): root cause, contributing factors, timeline, and preventive actions.
  • Act as the senior technical escalation for banking client issues — calm, precise, and solution-oriented.
• Monitoring & observability
  • Design and maintain the team's alerting strategy in GCP Cloud Monitoring — setting thresholds, reducing alert noise, and ensuring the right signals fire at the right severity.
  • Build and maintain dashboards (Grafana, GCP Monitoring, or equivalent) covering transaction throughput, API error rates, service latency, and MySQL query performance.
  • Define and track SLIs/SLOs for key product flows — payments authorisation, settlement processing, card management — and surface degradation early.
  • Instrument new services in partnership with engineering: ensure every new microservice ships with adequate logging, structured log fields, and correlation IDs.
• Back-office tooling & automation
  • Help design and build the internal back-office tools and support functions the team needs to operate effectively.
  • Write and maintain automation tooling in Python and/or Bash — scripts, schedulers, data reconciliation jobs.
  • Build internal CLI tools or runbook-linked scripts that junior analysts can invoke safely without senior oversight.
  • Own the tooling roadmap for the support function — prioritise what gets built next based on toil volume and incident frequency.
• Client technical support
  • Serve as the senior technical point of contact for all customer-facing product issues that escalate beyond first-line resolution.
  • Write clear, jargon-free incident communications for banking client operations teams during and after incidents.
  • Maintain a client-facing known-issues log and service status communication cadence.
• Documentation & knowledge management
  • Build and own the team's runbook library — step-by-step investigation procedures for every known failure pattern across the product suite.
  • Document every new incident type in a known-issues catalogue: symptom, root cause, resolution, recurrence trigger, and prevention status.
  • Produce onboarding materials that bring a new junior analyst to independent productivity within 6 weeks.
• Team leadership — hands-on
  • Lead a small, global support team — you are a working lead, not a manager removed from the queue.
  • Mentor and develop two junior application support analysts — review their investigations, coach their SQL and log techniques, and build their confidence on live incidents.
  • Run daily standups and weekly incident reviews across time zones — keeping a distributed team coordinated and nothing falling between shifts.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in application support, platform operations, or a technical operations role with a team leadership component.
• MySQL proficiency — writing complex queries, reading execution plans, diagnosing slow queries, understanding index behaviour.
• GCP experience — hands-on with Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, and ideally Cloud Functions or Pub/Sub.
• Microservice troubleshooting — comfortable tracing a failure across 3–5 services using correlation IDs and structured logs.
• Strong written communication — incident updates, PIRs, client communications, and runbooks are all part of your normal output.

Requirements

• Python or Bash scripting — you have written automation tools that saved real time, not just one-off scripts.
• Methodical incident investigation — you document as you go, form hypotheses, test them, and do not guess.
• Experience building or significantly contributing to a team knowledge base or runbook library.

Nice to Have

• Experience with distributed tracing tools — Cloud Trace, Jaeger, Zipkin, or equivalent.
• Grafana dashboard authoring.
• Exposure to SRE practices: SLO definition, error budgets, toil reduction.
• Familiarity with GCP Cloud Functions, Cloud Scheduler, or Workflows for automation.
• Experience administering Zendesk — configuring ticket views, SLA policies, macros, triggers, automations, and reporting.
• Background in a regulated or compliance-sensitive environment — fintech, banking, healthcare, or telecoms.

Working Hours & Expectations

Standard shift of 8–10 hours per day, with some overlap with US hours. Remote-friendly; in-person collaboration expectations to be discussed by region.