[Hiring] Senior Application Support Engineer @Zact

Role Description

We are building out a dedicated Application Support function for our GCP-hosted, microservices-based commercial card and payments platform. This role anchors our India coverage, working alongside an existing junior analyst in India and a US-based team of a Lead ASE and a Mid Analyst.

India is a significant and growing part of our banking client base — this role owns that coverage with full accountability. You will handle complex investigations, mentor the junior analyst in India, and be the senior technical presence during IST hours. You will also serve as the handoff point between India and US shifts, ensuring continuity across the global team.

What You’ll Own

• Incident investigation & triage
  • Lead investigation of complex, multi-service incidents during IST hours — from first signal through to root cause, with full documentation throughout.
  • Use GCP Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring to trace failures across microservice boundaries using correlation IDs and structured log analysis.
  • Write MySQL queries against production read replicas to investigate transaction status, card and account data, settlement records, and reconciliation discrepancies.
  • Handle tier-1 and tier-2 tickets independently; escalate to the Lead (US) with a structured, well-evidenced handoff when needed.
  • Own post-incident documentation for India-hours incidents — root cause, timeline, resolution, and prevention actions.
• India bank client coverage
  • Serve as the senior technical point of contact for all India bank client issues during IST hours.
  • Write clear, jargon-free incident communications and status updates for bank client operations teams.
  • Understand the regulatory and compliance sensitivity of banking clients — communications must be precise, professional, and audit-safe.
  • Maintain awareness of India-specific client configurations, integration patterns, and known issues.
  • Handle follow-up and ticket closure with clients — confirm resolution, explain what happened plainly, close cleanly.
• Shift handoff & global coordination
  • Own the India-to-US morning handoff — produce a clear async shift note covering open incidents, anything in investigation, and anything the US team should watch.
  • Pick up the US-to-India handoff at start of IST shift — review anything in flight, check monitoring, and brief the junior analyst.
  • Participate in team standup during the overlap window.
  • Flag anything that needs US Lead attention before the overlap window closes.
• Mentoring the junior analyst
  • Be the day-to-day mentor for the existing India junior analyst — pair on live investigations, review their ticket documentation, and build their confidence on tier-2 issues.
  • Conduct regular 1:1s focused on skill development — GCP log navigation, MySQL query building, client communication.
  • Review runbook entries written by the junior before they are committed to the knowledge base.
  • Escalate concerns about junior development to the Lead; advocate for the junior’s growth within the team.
• Monitoring & alerting
  • Review GCP dashboards and Zendesk alert channels at start of each IST shift — surface anomalies before clients report them.
  • Track open incidents during IST hours and ensure nothing is left unresolved or undocumented at shift end.
  • Contribute to improving alert definitions — flag noisy or misleading alerts to the Lead with evidence.
• Documentation & knowledge base
  • Document every new incident type investigated during IST hours — symptom, root cause, resolution, prevention status.
  • Write and improve runbook entries for IST-hours patterns and India-specific client issues.
  • Maintain and expand the MySQL investigation query library, shared across the global team.
  • Contribute to onboarding documentation — your experience ramp-up becomes the next hire’s starting point.
• Automation support
  • Contribute to the team’s automation efforts under the Lead’s direction.
  • Run and validate scheduled reconciliation queries; flag anomalies in output.
  • Test and refine log correlation scripts; suggest improvements based on IST-hours patterns.
  • Write or extend Python/Bash scripts for India-specific investigation tasks where patterns repeat.

Technology Environment

• Cloud platform: Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Logs & monitoring: GCP Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring — primary investigation and alerting tools
• Database: MySQL — read-only investigation queries; strict change-control for anything beyond SELECT
• Architecture: Microservices — REST APIs; tracing requests across service boundaries using correlation IDs
• Ticketing: Zendesk — queue management, incident documentation, client communication
• Scripting: Python / Bash — desirable; used for automation support and investigation tooling
• Product domain: Commercial card programs — card issuance, payments authorisation, settlement, spend controls
• Client environment: India community and regional banks — SLA-bound, RBI-regulated context, audit-sensitive

What We’re Looking For

• 10+ years in application support, technical operations, platform support, or a closely related role
• MySQL proficiency — writing complex SELECT queries with JOINs, subqueries, and WHERE clauses to answer specific investigation questions; reading results confidently
• GCP Cloud Logging or equivalent — hands-on experience using a cloud log platform (GCP, CloudWatch, Splunk, Datadog, or Kibana) to investigate real production issues
• Microservice architecture familiarity — comfortable tracing a failure across 3–5 services using correlation IDs and structured log fields
• REST API literacy — HTTP status codes, API response interpretation, tracing request chains
• Experience mentoring or guiding a junior colleague in a technical support context
• Clear written communication — incident updates, PIR documentation, client-facing messages — all under pressure
• Strong change-control discipline — no production data modifications without explicit authorisation and approval

Nice to Have

• GCP-specific experience — Cloud Logging query syntax, Cloud Monitoring dashboards, Cloud Trace
• Familiarity with Zendesk as a support platform — ticket views, SLA policies, macros
• Basic Python or Bash scripting — automation scripts, log parsing, or scheduled query jobs
• Experience in a regulated or compliance-sensitive environment — fintech, banking, healthcare, or telecoms
• Familiarity with RBI regulatory requirements or India banking compliance context — helpful but trainable
• Exposure to commercial card concepts — authorisation, settlement, BIN management, spend controls — fully trainable

Working Hours

• Standard shift of 8–10 hours per day, IST business hours
• ~2-hour overlap with the US team at end of IST day / start of US morning
• On-call expectations are shared across the team and structured fairly — on-call rotation design is part of the Lead’s remit and will be discussed