Production Support Engineer, Service Recovery (Banking, 1-year renewable contract)

Dear Applicant,

If you or someone you know is interested, please send the CV directly to [Confidential Information] (most preferred, as I may overlook some CVs due to the high volume).

Please note that visa sponsorship is not available at this time.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide end-to-end 24x7 production support for customer-facing banking applications, transaction-processing services and underlying technology infrastructure.
• Investigate and resolve customer-impacting issues including payment failures, transaction delays/reversals, reconciliation exceptions, login/authentication issues, duplicate or rejected transactions, and card-related incidents.
• Support production incidents across core banking, retail and wholesale banking, cash management, customer information, credit/debit cards and payment services.
• Perform end-to-end transaction tracing across applications, databases, APIs, middleware, operating systems, networks, storage and downstream services.
• Analyse application/system logs, SQL data, batch records, monitoring alerts, error messages and file-transfer results to identify root causes.
• Troubleshoot issues across application, database, scheduler, operating system, network, storage, middleware, external interfaces and third-party services.
• Support Start-of-Day/End-of-Day processing, production releases, application deployments, service restoration and Disaster Recovery exercises.
• Perform or coordinate infrastructure activities including network troubleshooting, OS/storage patching, vulnerability remediation, server deployment, migration, upgrades and capacity/performance checks.
• Support physical and virtual server environments, infrastructure provisioning, environment builds, lifecycle management, high availability, backup and recovery.
• Safely perform application, middleware, database and batch service restarts during maintenance, including pre-checks, post-change validation and health checks.
• Monitor systems, transactions, batch jobs, interfaces and file transfers using tools such as Splunk, Geneos, Control-M and SQL monitoring platforms.
• Develop and maintain dashboards, alerts and operational monitoring to improve service reliability and visibility.
• Automate operational and infrastructure activities using Ansible, UNIX/Linux shell scripting, PowerShell, Python and SQL.
• Apply Incident, Problem and Change Management practices and participate in major incident recovery to restore services within agreed SLA/KPI targets.
• Conduct root-cause analysis and post-incident reviews, driving corrective and preventive actions for recurring issues.
• Prepare change records, risk/impact assessments, implementation and validation plans, rollback procedures and production-readiness documentation.
• Coordinate with business users, banking operations, application, database, infrastructure, network, cybersecurity, command-centre and vendor teams.
• Maintain SOPs, runbooks, recovery procedures, implementation plans, incident reports and knowledge articles.
• Ensure all production activities comply with technology risk, information security, regulatory, audit, access-control and change-governance requirements.

Key Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related discipline, or equivalent relevant experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience in banking application support, infrastructure operations, production support or a combination of these areas.
• Mandatory experience in banking or financial services, supporting mission-critical systems in an SLA-driven environment.
• Proven experience handling customer-impacting and high-severity production incidents in a 24x7 environment.
• Strong hands-on experience investigating payments, transactions, authentication, core banking, cash management, card processing, batch, interfaces and file-transfer issues.
• Strong capability in end-to-end transaction tracing, log analysis, SQL investigation, data validation and root-cause analysis.
• Hands-on experience with multiple enterprise platforms such as UNIX/Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM AIX, Windows Server, AS/400 and/or mainframe.
• Experience with Splunk, Geneos, Control-M, SQL monitoring and enterprise application/infrastructure monitoring tools.
• Good understanding of networking, OS/storage patching, server deployment, VMware or equivalent virtualization, high availability, backup and Disaster Recovery.
• Practical automation/scripting experience using Ansible, UNIX/Linux shell scripting, PowerShell, Python or SQL.
• Strong knowledge of Incident, Problem and Change Management, including major incident recovery, implementation planning, risk assessment, validation, rollback and post-incident reviews.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, documentation and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to work independently and under strict time constraints, with strong focus on customer impact, transaction integrity, operational risk and service availability.
• Willingness to participate in rotating shifts, 24x7 on-call coverage, weekend/public-holiday support and after-hours production releases or maintenance.
• Relevant certifications such as ITIL, RHCSA/RHCE, IBM AIX, Microsoft, VMware, Ansible, cloud, database or infrastructure certifications are advantageous.
• Experience with retail/wholesale banking, payments, reconciliation, clearing/settlement, APIs, middleware, managed file transfer or Oracle/Microsoft SQL Server is an advantage.
• Exposure to Azure/AWS, cybersecurity, vulnerability management, regulatory compliance and audit controls is an advantage.