IST/Switch Production Support Engineer

We are seeking an experienced IST/Switch Production Support Engineer to provide L2/L3 support for mission-critical payment processing platforms. The ideal candidate will possess strong expertise in payment-switch operations, ISO 8583 transaction processing, Linux administration, production incident management, and end-to-end transaction troubleshooting.

This role is responsible for ensuring the stability, availability, and performance of payment services by rapidly diagnosing and resolving incidents across APIs, middleware, load balancing layers, payment-switch applications, databases, BIN routing configurations, and issuer/downstream integrations. The candidate should have hands-on experience supporting IST/Switch or a comparable payment-switch platform within a high-volume production environment.

Key Responsibilities

Production Support & Incident Management

• Provide L2/L3 production support for IST/Switch and payment processing applications.
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and resolve issues across the complete transaction flow:
  • API/WSO2
  • Layer 7 (L7) Load Balancing
  • IST/Switch
  • Issuer and downstream payment systems
• Participate in major incident management activities, ensuring timely resolution and restoration of services.
• Provide clear communication regarding business impact, technical findings, escalation status, and recovery progress.

Transaction Processing & Analysis

• Investigate transaction failures, declines, timeout scenarios, connectivity issues, and performance degradation.
• Analyze ISO 8583 messages, response codes, message types, and data elements to identify transaction processing issues.
• Trace transactions through application logs, system logs, and monitoring tools to determine points of failure, latency, or interruption.
• Distinguish switch-related issues from upstream and downstream dependencies.

Routing & Connectivity Troubleshooting

• Troubleshoot BIN routing issues and assess impact on authorization and payment processing flows.
• Investigate issuer timeout patterns, transaction declines, and routing failures.
• Analyze network connectivity problems, intermittent communication failures, and L7 port disconnect events affecting transaction processing.
• Determine incident ownership across APIs, middleware, load balancers, payment-switch infrastructure, databases, network components, and external payment processors.

Monitoring & Operational Excellence

• Utilize monitoring platforms such as NetXMS to review:
  • Transaction throughput (TPS)
  • System availability
  • Queue health
  • Database performance
  • Application health metrics
• Correlate alerts, logs, transaction evidence, and connectivity data to provide comprehensive impact assessments and remediation plans.
• Differentiate actual service-impacting incidents from maintenance activities and false-positive alerts.
• Identify recurring issues and recommend monitoring enhancements, resilience improvements, and operational efficiencies.

Linux & Platform Support

• Perform advanced Linux troubleshooting involving:
  • Services and processes
  • Log analysis
  • CPU and memory utilization
  • File systems
  • Network sockets and ports
  • Connectivity diagnostics
• Support application deployment validation and post-implementation monitoring activities when required.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Coordinate with Application Development, Middleware, Infrastructure, Database, Network Operations, and External Payment Partners to resolve production incidents.
• Participate in problem management activities and contribute to root cause analysis (RCA) efforts.
• Support continuous service improvement initiatives and operational best practices.

Required Qualifications:

• Experience Required: 5+ years of relevant experience in Payment Switch / Production Support environments.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Experience providing production support for IST/Switch or similar payment-switch platforms.
• Strong understanding of payment authorization flows and electronic payment processing ecosystems.
• Experience in high-availability, high-volume production environments.
• Excellent analytical, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to work in a 24x7 production support environment, including on-call support when required.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting financial services, banking, or card payment ecosystems.
• Knowledge of API gateways such as WSO2.
• Familiarity with middleware technologies and integration platforms.
• Experience working with high-availability payment infrastructure.
• Understanding of networking concepts, load balancing, and transaction routing architectures.