Production Support Specialist

Title: Production Support Specialist
Location: Buffalo, NY (Hybrid)
Duration: 6 months (possibility of extension)
JD:

• Must have good Unix/Linux experience, SQL skills, and experience with monitoring tools like Splunk,
• On-site in Buffalo, NY: 2-3 days per week, so candidates must be local and willing to commute
• Total experience: 5+ years

• In this team, you'll help build a meaningful engineering discipline, combining software and systems know-how to develop engineering solutions to technology operations problems. We focus on maintaining service stability by triaging and resolving incidents, restoring services quickly, and providing clear communications to stakeholders. In partnership with software development and infrastructure team, we also enhance existing systems, maintain reliable infrastructure, and reduce toil through automation. Our team is founded on critical technology skills, problem solving and excellent communication. Your contribution will be as a player/coach, bringing your technical experience and hands on expertise as well as your leadership skills.

• Service support & incident management
• Monitor and support production services, responding to incidents and service requests within agreed SLAs.
• Perform initial triage (logs, monitoring, data checks), identify likely causes, and implement workarounds/fixes within your control.
• Co-ordinate recovery activities with partner teams (engineering, infrastructure, network, vendors) and escalate to the Production Support Lead/Major Incident Manager for high-severity incidents.
• Provide timely, accurate updates on impact, recovery progress and next steps to stakeholders.

• Contribute to root cause analysis and post-incident reviews, capturing actions to prevent recurrence.
• Create and maintain runbooks, knowledge articles and operational checklists to reduce time to restore service.
• Identify opportunities for automation and improved monitoring/alerting to reduce noise and improve resilience.

• Participate in change and release activities (e.g., patching/evergreening, DR tests, role swaps), ensuring operational readiness.
• Review changes for supportability and operational risk; raise concerns to the Support Lead/Manager where appropriate.

• Review and contribute to avoiding repeated alerts from production environment via defect management in the partnership with development team or optimizing our alert system.
• Automate daily manual routine work.
• Develop tools to simplify our daily operational work.

• Participate in a rota for out-of-hours support/on-call as required by the team operating model (including weekends/holidays where scheduled).
• Work flexible hours aligned to service coverage needs (e.g., staggered start/finish times).

• Experience in production support / IT service management in a regulated environment, ideally within banking technology.
• Strong understanding of IT infrastructure concepts (on-prem and cloud), including networking fundamentals and service dependencies.
• Hands-on capability with Unix/Linux, SQL, Kubernetes, log analysis and troubleshooting in distributed systems.
• Experience using monitoring/observability tools (e.g., Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Patrol or equivalents).
• Working knowledge of Incident, Problem, Change and Release Management (ITIL-aligned).
• Strong communication skills in English, comfortable working with global teams across time zones.
• Proven ability to collaborate across boundaries, prioritise effectively, and stay calm under pressure.

• Payment domain knowledge (payment processing concepts, message flows).
• Exposure to Oracle, MQ, Kafka, WebSphere, Zookeeper, Control-M, etc.
• Experience supporting DR exercises and resilience testing.
• ITIL certification.
• Familiarity with productivity tooling (e.g., Copilot/Claude) to support documentation, analysis and automation ideas (within policy).