Senior Application Support Engineer – US (Remote)

Zact•Saratoga, CA

2d•Remote

About The Position

Zact is a Fintech innovator dedicated to a singular idea: Organizations need simpler expense and payment management systems that align the spending employee with finance and accounting while providing inherent guardrails and continuous reconciliation with financial systems. Zact enables all parts of the company to Pay by the Rules. 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.

Requirements

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 Haves

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

Responsibilities

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
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
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
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
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
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
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