Description
As a Vice President Production Engineering Lead within Merchant Services, you will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for the reliability, resiliency, observability, and operational readiness of critical payment platforms. You will provide end-to-end production ownership across the service lifecycle, driving stability improvements, incident reduction, automation, and operational excellence.
This highly technical individual contributor role partners across software engineering, product, infrastructure, cyber, and production support teams to improve service health, resiliency, and client experience. You will serve as a trusted technical authority during major incidents, production readiness reviews, resiliency exercises, and operational governance activities while championing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles and modern engineering practices.
Job Responsibilities
- Serve as the technical production owner for critical merchant payment services and client-facing platforms, driving reliability, availability, scalability, operational efficiency, and client experience through SRE principles.
- Evaluate production readiness for releases, ensuring operational controls, supportability, resiliency, observability, and recovery requirements are met.
- Lead technical response and restoration efforts during major production incidents, accelerating recovery and coordinating across engineering, infrastructure, cyber, and support teams.
- Partner with development teams to identify recurring failure patterns, drive root cause remediation, reduce technical debt, and prevent recurrence.
- Define and improve SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, reliability metrics, monitoring, telemetry, dashboards, alerting, and operational analytics.
- Design and implement automation that reduces manual effort, operational risk, and mean time to resolution while improving service reliability.
- Lead resiliency planning, failover testing, recovery validation, continuity exercises, and production lifecycle reviews.
- Drive adoption of enterprise-authorized AI-assisted engineering and automation practices while establishing appropriate validation, secure coding, peer review, and testing standards.
- Apply modern SDLC tooling, AI-assisted development capabilities, and engineering practices to improve automation, quality, delivery efficiency, and operational outcomes.
- Maintain strong production governance, including access controls, operational procedures, audit readiness, runbooks, documentation, MEPC execution, and operational review processes.
- Evaluate emerging technologies, engineering tooling, and AI-assisted operational capabilities that improve service health, support effectiveness, and production reliability.
Required Qualifications, Capabilities, and Skills
- Extensive experience supporting large-scale, mission-critical production environments in high-volume transaction or payment platforms.
- Five years applying Production Engineering or Site Reliability Engineering principles to improve reliability and operational performance. Strong background in Site Reliability Engineering principles, Production Engineering, Application Support, Platform Engineering, or Technology Operations.
- Proven experience leading complex production incidents, root cause analysis, problem management, service restoration, and recurrence elimination.
- Experience supporting highly available distributed systems across cloud, hybrid, and enterprise technology environments.
- Strong knowledge of observability, monitoring, telemetry, event management, dashboards, alerting, and operational intelligence.
- Working knowledge of AWS services, cloud operations, and cloud-native operational practices.
- Experience with production observability technologies such as Grafana, Splunk, Dynatrace, OpenSearch, or comparable platforms.
- Experience developing automation using scripting, system integrations, engineering tooling, CI/CD pipelines, or release automation.
- Demonstrated experience with enterprise-approved AI-assisted software engineering tools and responsible AI practices, including validation, security, and data-sensitivity considerations.
- Strong understanding of resiliency engineering, failover, disaster recovery, production controls, operational risk, and enterprise governance practices.
- Strong technical leadership, communication, and influencing skills, with the ability to drive outcomes across engineering, infrastructure, cyber, product, and support organizations.
Preferred Qualifications, Capabilities, and Skills
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent experience.
- Experience supporting payment processing, merchant acquiring, or high-volume transaction platforms.
- Hands-on experience with AWS and enterprise observability platforms including Grafana, Splunk, Dynatrace, or OpenSearch.
- Strong SQL skills for transaction investigation, data validation, reconciliation, and operational analysis.
- Familiarity with Linux/Unix, application servers, networking, DNS, SSL/TLS, firewalls, and infrastructure dependencies.
- Experience with GitHub Copilot, AI-assisted engineering, and prompt engineering for operational analysis, automation, troubleshooting, or reporting.
- Familiarity with resilience engineering, chaos testing, disaster recovery, ITIL, and enterprise production governance frameworks.