Application Support Analyst

Company Description

Standard Bank Group is a leading Africa-focused financial services group, and an innovative player on the global stage, that offers a variety of career-enhancing opportunities – plus the chance to work alongside some of the sector’s most talented, motivated professionals. Our clients range from individuals, to businesses of all sizes, high net worth families and large multinational corporates and institutions. We’re passionate about creating growth in Africa. Bringing true, meaningful value to our clients and the communities we serve and creating a real sense of purpose for you.

Job Description

Responsible for the stability, performance, and reliability of our digital banking core. Ensure “zero-downtime” operations by leading rapid incident response, performing deep-dive root cause analysis (RCA), and collaborating closely with the Finacle Core team to resolve complex integration bottlenecks.

• Finacle Support Liaison: Serve as the primary technical point of escalation for all integration issues involving Finacle and coordinate with the Core Banking team to troubleshoot data discrepancies, connectivity drops, and API failures.
• Incident Command: Ensure clear communication with stakeholders Problem Management: Ensure the “blameless” RCA process to identify systemic issues and prevent recurring outages in the integration layer.
• Recurring Incident Rate: Reduce the volume of repeat incidents by 30% through effective Problem Management and permanent bug fixes.
• Monitoring Coverage: Ensure 100% of production microservices have automated health checks and p99 latency alerts.
• Environment Health: Monitor the stability of OpenShift and other servers, ensuring the optimal performance of the middleware services running within them.
• Proactive Monitoring: Drive the strategy for advanced alerting and logging (using Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, or Dynatrace). Ensure that support teams are alerted to anomalies before they impact end-users.
• Patch & Release Support: Oversee the safe deployment of hotfixes and platform updates, ensuring that automated rollbacks are in place for failed changes.
• Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR): Achieve an average MTTR of < 45 minutes for critical (P1) integration incidents.
• SLA Compliance: Maintain 99.99% uptime for critical integration gateways connecting to Finacle.
• First-Touch Resolution: Increase the percentage of incidents resolved by the Platform Support team without escalating to the Engineering/Development squads.

Qualifications

• BSc IT, Computer Sciences or related field.
• Relevant professional certification such as ITIL Foundation, Sun Certified Java Developer (SCJP), Oracle Certified Associate (OCA), Microsoft Certified Professional and Developer (MCP, MCSD) can be an added advantage.

Experience:

• 3-4years deep operational understanding of Finacle Core Banking (e.g., troubleshooting Finacle Integrator, batch job failures, or ISO8583/REST messaging).

• Expert-level ability to read and debug Java code. Ability to navigate and troubleshoot Java platform utilities is a significant plus. Strong experience supporting containerized workloads in OpenShift, including log analysis, pod debugging, and resource scaling.

• Experience with Terraform/Ansible for environment automation and troubleshooting and Kafka/RabbitMQ for message-queue monitoring. Medium proficiency in Oracle PL/SQL for data investigation and performance tuning within the Finacle database environment.

Additional Information

Behavioural Competencies:

• Adopting Practical Approaches
• Articulating Information
• Checking Things
• Documenting Facts
• Embracing Change
• Following Procedures
• Interpreting Data
• Producing Output

Technical Competencies:

• Application Support
• Business Analysis Environments and Perspectives
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning
• Continuous Deployment
• Database Administration
• Project Management (Project Mgmt)
• Stakeholder Management
• Testing (unit, regression, integration)