Application Support Engineer

• 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 - this is not off-the-shelf tooling configuration; it includes scoping, designing, and writing the tools from scratch where needed
• Example: an internal investigation dashboard that pulls GCP log context and MySQL transaction data for a given incident ID in one view
• Example: automated log correlation scripts that surface the root cause of a known error pattern in under 2 minutes
• Example: MySQL query templates that auto-populate with a transaction ID and return the full investigation snapshot
• Example: alert-to-ticket automation that pre-populates incident records with log context and affected service
• 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
• Identify manual reconciliation or reporting tasks that can be replaced by scheduled queries or GCP Cloud Functions
• 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
• Work directly with client technical teams (bank IT, card ops) to diagnose integration issues, file format mismatches, or API usage errors
• 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
• Write and maintain a MySQL query reference for common support investigations (transaction lookup, card status, spend limit checks, settlement reconciliation)
• 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
• Maintain a living architecture reference showing how services connect, what each service owns, and which logs to check first for each component

Team leadership - hands-on

• Lead a small, global support team - you are a working lead, not a manager removed from the queue; you will handle tickets alongside the analysts based on volume and complexity
• 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
• Define team support processes: ticket triage criteria, severity classification, escalation thresholds, SLA tracking
• Partner with engineering and product to represent the support team’s perspective - surfacing recurring issues, requesting observability improvements, and advocating for supportability in new releases

Technology Environment

• Cloud platform: Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
• Log & monitoring: GCP Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, Pub/Sub; Grafana
• Database: MySQL - production read replicas for investigation; strict change-control for any writes
• Architecture: Microservices - REST APIs with correlation ID tracing across service boundaries
• Scripting & automation: Python (primary), Bash - for tooling, automation, and log parsing
• Ticketing: Internal ticketing system (Jira or equivalent)
• Product domain: Commercial card programs - card issuance, authorization, settlement, spend controls, reporting
• Client environment: Banking clients (community and regional banks) - regulated, SLA-bound, audit-sensitive

• 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 (log queries, log-based metrics), Cloud Monitoring (alerting policies, uptime checks), and ideally Cloud Functions or Pub/Sub
• Microservice troubleshooting - comfortable tracing a failure across 3-5 services using correlation IDs and structured logs
• 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
• Strong written communication - incident updates, PIRs, client communications, and runbooks are all part of your normal output
• 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; familiarity with Zendesk API or webhook integrations is a bonus
• Background in a regulated or compliance-sensitive environment - fintech, banking, healthcare, or telecoms
• Familiarity with commercial card concepts (authorisation flows, settlement, BIN management, spend controls) - helpful but fully trainable

Note on Domain Experience

Prior fintech or banking experience is helpful but not a requirement. What matters is depth in GCP, MySQL, and microservice troubleshooting - and the instinct to automate. We provide structured onboarding into the product domain and a growing runbook library to support ramp-up.