Senior Application Support Engineer - US (Remote)

About the Role

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.

Location

• Zact is a global company with multiple locations across US, Europe and India.
• We provide 100% Remote Working Option.
• Candidates applying for this role should be located in the United States.

What Makes This Role Different From a Standard Support Position

You will lead the team and work the queue alongside them - this is a hands-on lead role, not a supervisory one. Beyond ticket handling, you are expected to identify patterns, eliminate root causes permanently, and help design and build the back-office tools and support functions the team needs. You will have real influence over how the product is monitored and how engineering is held accountable for supportability.

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 - 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

What We're Looking For

• 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.

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