Support Specialist (Banking, 1-year renewable contract)

Key Responsibilities

• Lead production services for a geographically dispersed group, ensuring daily datacenter availability scheduling for both planned and unplanned maintenance across five production domains: Consumer Online, Mobile Banking, Merrill Wealth Online, Payments, and Merchant Services.
• Oversee and review monthly maintenance requests, targeting less than 1% of requests causing unplanned customer impact.
• Approve or deny all change requests impacting the five highlighted production domains.
• Prepare comprehensive application deployment instructions, accounting for dependencies and operational capacity.
• Collaborate closely with Release Management for scheduling, technical assistance, and documentation related to code deployments, including emergency requests.
• Partner with various teams (network, application, workload management, problem management, and infrastructure support) to schedule updates and resolve ongoing issues.
• Establish communication windows with Line of Business representatives for planned outages.
• Participate in the OnCall Manager on Duty rotation, managing disruptions and providing updates to senior leadership during high-impact service interruptions.
• Orchestrate datacenter network traffic routing for operational activities, business continuity, and compliance.
• Collaborate with the Vendor Liaison group on vendor code changes and infrastructure deployments.
• Work with multiple stakeholders (Project Management, SMEs, Network/Infrastructure Architecture, etc.) to define and implement operational readiness routines for monitoring and managing datacenter traffic and outages.
• Design and develop deployment script templates and maintain a library of deployment plans.
• Collaborate with Application Delivery to design and implement deployment strategies using bank-approved tools.
• Serve as an escalation contact for frontline teams during critical traffic management actions to resolve production incidents.
• Generate change progress reports and escalations as needed for senior leadership.

Key Requirements

• Proven experience in production services or operations management, particularly in a datacenter environment.
• Strong understanding of change management processes and methodologies.
• Familiarity with the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and deployment strategies.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively across various teams and levels of management.
• Experience in managing and orchestrating datacenter traffic and application deployment.
• Knowledge of consumer banking routing mechanisms is preferred.
• Ability to analyze and resolve complex issues, providing timely updates to senior leadership.
• Strong organizational skills with a focus on detail and accuracy.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment and manage multiple priorities effectively.
• Bachelor’s degree in a related field or equivalent experience preferred.