Systems Analyst

About Anza

Anza is building a mortgage insurance company from first principles. Most mortgage insurers operate on decades-old technology, manual workflows, organizational structures, and operating assumptions that have evolved incrementally over time. We believe there is a fundamentally better way.

Our vision is to build the industry's most technology-enabled mortgage insurer, one where software, automation, AI, analytics, and thoughtful operating design create better experiences for customers while allowing the business to scale efficiently without simply adding people.

We are not interested in making legacy processes slightly better. We are interested in building the operating model that mortgage insurance should have had all along.

About the role

Anza runs the mortgage-insurance platform that lenders, servicers, and our internal underwriting staff depend on end to end. When something breaks - a screen won't load, an API call returns an error, a partner's file didn't process, an order looks stuck - you're the first person to look at it. This is the front line of our support group. You'll take reports from external customers and internal users, investigate them against production logs, dashboards, and data, and come back with a clear answer.

Early on you'll resolve the known issues independently and escalate the rest with good evidence attached. Over time, as you learn the platform, the set of things you can close on your own grows - and you'll be the one writing the runbooks that make that possible for everyone after you. You'll work across a Java backend, a React web portal suite, and an AWS estate instrumented with Datadog. You don't need experience with any of them. You need to be curious, methodical, good at writing, and genuinely interested in figuring out why things break. We'll teach the rest.

What you'll do

Respond and Investigate

• Take first response on production issues from customers (lenders, partners) and internal users, and own each ticket through to closure.
• Triage by impact and urgency, and route or escalate anything you can't resolve - with your findings attached, not just the customer's words.
• Investigate before escalating: reproduce where you can, check the logs and dashboards, and use the runbooks. Work out whether it's a defect, a data problem, an environment issue, or the system working as intended.
• Search application logs and dashboards in Datadog, follow a failing request through the system, and use browser dev tools to tell a front-end problem from a back-end one.
• Run SQL queries against production read access to check what the system actually recorded, and look up the state of a stuck order or workflow.

Communicate

• Write the customer-facing response: clear, accurate, specific, with a next step or workaround. Adjust for a partner's technical integrator versus an internal underwriter.
• Keep customers and internal stakeholders updated on anything that stays open, without needing to be chased.
• Raise clean defect reports - steps to reproduce, environment, affected IDs, log links, expected versus actual.

Improve

• Write up what you learn. Every investigation that isn't already documented becomes a runbook or known-issue entry.
• Flag recurring problems as patterns, with evidence, so engineering can fix the underlying cause instead of the symptom.
• Read release notes ahead of deployments and prepare for the questions each change will generate.
• Support incident response as the investigation and communication arm, and take part in post-incident reviews.

Qualifications

Minimum Education

• Bachelors Degree

Minimum Skills

• Technical support, service desk, QA, systems analyst, or similar role or equivalent hands-on experience in a technical environment where you diagnosed problems rather than just logged them.
• Basic SQL. You can write a SELECT with a JOIN and a date filter against a relational database, and you're comfortable learning more. We'll assess this at a practical level, not a trick-question level.
• Comfort reading logs and error messages. You've searched logs before - in any tool - and you can tell signal from noise.
• Working understanding of how web applications and APIs fit together. Browser, request, server, database. Status codes, JSON payloads, what a 401 versus a 500 means.
• Browser developer tools basics: network tab and console.
• Clear written English. You can explain a technical problem to a non-technical person succinctly, without confusing or patronising them. This is the single most important skill in the role.
• A methodical, evidence-led way of working. You check before you conclude, you're comfortable saying "I don't know yet, here's what I'm looking at," and you don't guess in front of a customer.
• Genuine curiosity and follow-through. You want to know why something failed, and you don't drop a ticket because it got awkward.
• Care and discretion with production and customer data. You'll have read access to real customer and loan data in a regulated environment.
• We are not expecting you to arrive knowing our stack. We are expecting you to be someone who learns it quickly and asks good questions along the way.
• All optional. Anything here shortens your ramp; none of it will rule you out.
• Any observability or log platform - Datadog, Splunk, ELK/OpenSearch, Grafana, New Relic, CloudWatch.
• Any exposure to Java, or to reading a stack trace and identifying roughly where it failed.
• Any exposure to JavaScript/TypeScript or React, enough to read a component and reason about a broken page.
• AWS familiarity at any level: CloudWatch, RDS, S3, SQS, Lambda. Kubernetes awareness is a bonus, not a need.

Preferred Skills

• Using an API client like Postman or curl to reproduce a failing request.
• Supporting a B2B product with external technical customers, rather than only internal users or consumers.
• Login and access troubleshooting: SSO, OAuth/OIDC, JWTs, API keys, permission errors.
• Message queues or asynchronous processing: queues, retries, dead-letter queues, and explaining "it hasn't happened yet" to a customer who expected it instantly.
• File-based processing support: SFTP/S3 feeds, batch jobs, per-record rejections.
• Workflow or BPM engines: Camunda, Temporal, or similar - especially diagnosing stuck processes.
• Support tooling: Jira, Jira Service Management, Zendesk, Freshdesk, PagerDuty; SLAs, knowledge bases.
• Any scripting: Python, Bash, or SQL automation. To answer repeat questions faster.
• Domain adjacency: any regulated, transaction-heavy industry: financial services, payments, lending, insurance, healthcare, logistics. Mortgage or mortgage-insurance exposure is a nice bonus; we fully expect to teach the domain.
• Working in a regulated environment (SOC 2, NYDFS, PCI-DSS or similar) and understanding why the access controls exist.
• A degree in a technical field, or a support/IT certification; neither is required, and practical experience counts equally.

What we offer
We're committed to creating an environment where our team members can thrive both professionally and personally. We currently offer:

• Competitive Compensation - Including salary and performance bonuses.
• Comprehensive Benefits - Health, dental, vision, and mental wellness support.
• Retirement Savings - 401(k) with company matching.
• Career advancement opportunities with business growth.
• Inclusive Culture - A diverse, collaborative, and supportive workplace where every voice is valued.
• Perks & Extras - Generous PTO, team events, wellness programs, and more.