NBBL- Lead Application Support Engineer

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI); Hyderabad, Chennai; On-site; INR 2,000,000 - 4,000,000; Full time

Job summary

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) invites experienced payments professionals to join the NBBL/BBPS operations. You will own and operate a 24x7 command centre, lead major incident responses, and oversee end-to-end L1/L2 support across a broad ecosystem of banks, billers and partners.

You will stabilise integrations, drive RCA, and design scalable architectures to ensure reliability under peak loads, with strong emphasis on security flow and governance.

Qualifications

• 8–12 years of experience in payments domain, program management, support operations, or backend systems engineering.
• Proven track record as Incident Commander or Major Incident Manager in high-scale payments or fintech.
• Deep expertise in Java/Spring Boot backend systems with strong debugging skills.
• Hands-on payments systems and protocols familiarity — UPI, IMPS, BBPS, or switch platforms.
• Strong understanding of API integrations, distributed systems, and on-premises infra management.
• Experience troubleshooting production issues at scale under high load.

Responsibilities

• Own and operate a 24x7 command centre for NBBL (BBPS) with zero unplanned downtime.
• Act as Incident Commander during critical events with cross-functional leadership.
• Lead production incident troubleshooting across failures, latency and errors.
• Manage stabilisation of integrations with OUs, Banks, NBFCs, Billers and partners.
• Own L1/L2 support operations — rosters, shifts, SLAs, and dashboards.
• Analyse reconciliation and settlement issues for financial accuracy.
• Handle certificate, signature, and security flow issues consistently.
• Design system architecture for reliability, scalability and high availability.
• Strengthen monitoring and observability with logs and dashboards.
• Drive RCA and preventive measures to eliminate recurrence.
• Maintain runbooks, SOPs and escalation matrices for governance.
• Collaborate with internal teams and NPCI stakeholders for improvements.

Skills

Incident Commander

Payments domain

Real-time systems

24x7 operations

Stakeholder management

API integrations

On-prem infrastructure

Root Cause Analysis

Monitoring dashboards

Security flows

Tools

Grafana

ELK

Splunk

Job description

The opportunity

India's payments infrastructure is scaling at an unprecedented pace, and BBPS (NBBL) is at the heart of it. We are building a world-class team of payments professionals Incident Commanders, Solution Architects, and Support Specialists to own production stability, drive ecosystem integrations, and ensure that millions of transactions settle seamlessly, every single day. If you thrive in high-stakes, real-time environments and want to shape the backbone of India's bill payments ecosystem, this is your moment.

Job details

• Own and operate a 24x7 command centre for the NBBL (BBPS) payments ecosystem, ensuring round-the-clock production readiness and zero unplanned downtime.
• Act as Incident Commander during critical production events — leading bridge calls, driving cross-functional resolution, and managing real-time stakeholder communication.
• Lead production incident troubleshooting across transaction failures, latency spikes, 503 errors, and payment switch anomalies at scale.
• Manage and stabilize integrations with OUs, Banks, NBFCs, Billers, and Ecosystem partners, ensuring seamless onboarding and sustained operational health.
• Own L1/L2 support operations end-to-end — including rosters, shift planning, SLA adherence, performance tracking, and team accountability.
• Analyse and resolve Reconciliation and Settlement issues, ensuring financial accuracy and timely closure across all partner touchpoints.
• Handle certificate, signature, and security flow related issues, maintaining the integrity and compliance of payment transactions.
• Design and continuously improve system architecture for reliability, scalability, and high availability under peak transaction loads.
• Strengthen monitoring and observability across the ecosystem — building and maintaining logs, alerts, and dashboards for proactive incident prevention.
• Drive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for all major incidents and implement preventive measures to eliminate recurrence.
• Maintain and evolve runbooks, SOPs, and escalation matrices to ensure operational consistency and rapid incident response.
• Collaborate closely with internal engineering teams, external partners, and NPCI stakeholders to resolve issues and drive platform improvements.
• Produce incident reports, daily and weekly dashboards, and governance summaries for leadership and partner visibility.
• Identify systemic gaps in API integrations and distributed systems and work with architecture teams to remediate them.
• Manage on-premises infrastructure stability, ensuring the payments platform performs reliably under high-load, real-time transaction environments.
• Drive ecosystem partner governance — handling escalations, enforcing SLAs, and ensuring closure on all open issues with banks and billers.
• Champion a culture of operational excellence — continuously raising the bar on response times, resolution quality, and team capability.
• Support shift coverage planning and ensure the escalation matrix is always current, tested, and actionable.

Key skills and experience required

• 8–12 years of experience in payments domain, program management, support operations, or backend systems engineering.
• Proven track record as an Incident Commander or Major Incident Manager in a high-scale, real-time payments or fintech environment.
• Deep expertise in Java / Spring Boot backend systems with strong debugging and root cause analysis capabilities.
• Hands-on experience with payments systems and protocols — UPI, IMPS, BBPS, and/or payment switch platforms.
• Strong understanding of API integrations, distributed systems architecture, and on-premises infrastructure management.
• Demonstrated ability to troubleshoot production issues at scale — including transaction failures, latency degradation, and system errors under high load.
• Experience managing L1/L2 support teams — including shift planning, performance management, SLA governance, and escalation handling.
• Proficiency with monitoring and observability tools — log aggregation, alerting platforms, and real-time dashboards (e.g., Grafana, ELK, Splunk, or equivalent).
• Strong stakeholder management skills — ability to coordinate effectively with internal engineering teams, external partners (banks, billers), and regulatory bodies like NPCI.
• Experience handling reconciliation, settlement workflows, and financial accuracy validation in a payments context.
• Solid understanding of certificate management, digital signatures, and payment security flows.
• Ability to design and maintain runbooks, SOPs, escalation matrices, and operational governance frameworks.
• Excellent communication skills — capable of leading high-pressure bridge calls, producing clear incident reports, and presenting dashboards to senior leadership.
• Comfort operating in 24x7, on-call, high-pressure environments with the ability to make rapid, sound decisions under stress.
• Experience working in on-premises, high-availability infrastructure environments with a strong grasp of system reliability and scalability principles.