APPLICATIONS AND ENVIRONMENT SRE - Payments & Automation

Role: APPLICATIONS AND ENVIRONMENT SRE

Location: London

Contract

Senior Application Maintenance & Support Lead (L2/L3) - Payments & Automation

Role Summary

We are seeking an experienced Senior Application Maintenance & Support Lead to manage L2/L3 production support, incident management, problem management, and automation initiatives for critical payment processing platforms. The ideal candidate should possess strong expertise in Cross-Border Payments, SWIFT, Wires, ACH, SEPA, Real Time Payments, and modern automation technologies to drive operational efficiency, service reliability, and platform stability.

The candidate will lead support teams, reduce operational overhead through automation, improve application availability, and collaborate with business and technology stakeholders to ensure seamless payment processing across global markets.

Key Responsibilities

Application Support & Operations

• Lead L2/L3 support for business-critical payment applications operating in 24x7 production environments.
• Manage incident triage, troubleshooting, root cause analysis (RCA), and problem resolution.
• Drive restoration activities for high-priority incidents and ensure adherence to SLAs.
• Monitor application health, performance, and stability using enterprise monitoring tools.
• Conduct post-incident reviews and implement preventive measures.
• Coordinate releases, deployments, change activities, and production validations.

Payments Domain Support

• Support payment processing platforms covering:
  • Cross-Border Payments
  • SWIFT MT/MX Messaging
  • Wire Transfers
  • ACH Payments
  • SEPA Payments
  • Real Time Payments (RTP)
  • ISO 20022 Migration
  • Payment Investigations & Reconciliation
  • Liquidity & Settlement Processing
• Understand payment life cycle, message flows, settlement processes, and exception handling.
• Partner with business operations teams to resolve payment processing issues and regulatory exceptions.

Automation & Engineering Excellence

• Identify manual support activities and develop automation solutions.
• Build automated workflows for:
  • Incident remediation
  • Health checks
  • Batch monitoring
  • Alert correlation
  • Environment validation
  • Operational reporting
• Implement self-healing capabilities and AIOps practices.
• Develop scripts and utilities using Python, Shell, PowerShell, or Java.
• Drive observability improvements through dashboards, monitoring, and predictive alerting.

Leadership & Governance

• Lead a team of L2/L3 support engineers across multiple geographies.
• Establish support processes, KPIs, runbooks, and operational standards.
• Provide technical guidance and mentoring to junior team members.
• Participate in governance meetings and executive status reporting.
• Ensure compliance with audit, security, and regulatory requirements.

Continuous Improvement

• Reduce ticket volumes through permanent fixes and automation.
• Improve MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) and application availability.
• Drive problem management and technical debt reduction initiatives.
• Support modernization and cloud transformation programs.

Required Skills & Experience

Technical Skills

• 10+ years of IT experience with 5+ years leading application support teams.
• Strong experience in:
  • Production Support (L2/L3)
  • Incident, Problem & Change Management
  • Application Monitoring & Observability
  • API and Microservices Support
  • SQL & Database Troubleshooting (Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL)
  • Linux/Unix Administration
  • Middleware Technologies (Kafka, MQ, EMS)
  • Scheduling Tools (Control-M, Autosys)
• Scripting and automation experience using:
  • Python
  • Shell Scripting
  • PowerShell
  • Ansible
• Experience with:
  • Splunk
  • Dynatrace
  • AppDynamics
  • ELK
  • Grafana
  • Prometheus

Payments Domain Expertise

• Deep understanding of:
  • SWIFT Payments
  • Cross-Border Transactions
  • Correspondent Banking
  • ISO 20022
  • Fedwire
  • CHAPS
  • ACH
  • SEPA
  • RTP
  • Payment Reconciliation
  • Settlement Systems
• Experience supporting Tier-1 banking payment platforms.

Cloud & DevOps

• Exposure to:
  • AWS/Azure/GCP
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Infrastructure Automation