Head of Application Support

PayNet (Payments Network Malaysia); Kuala Lumpur; On-site; MYR 240,000 - 360,000; Full time

Job summary

PayNet (Payments Network Malaysia) seeks an experienced leader to drive end-to-end Application Support for the nation’s payment platforms. You will oversee production support, incident management, change governance, and service reliability, partnering with Engineering, Infrastructure, Cyber Security, Product, and Business teams.

The role emphasizes building an operations-centric organization with strong ownership, automation, and continuous improvement to ensure highly available, secure, and

Qualifications

• Proven experience leading Application Support, Production Support, or Service Operations teams.
• Experience in high-availability environments with strict SLAs.
• Strong ITIL practice knowledge across Incident, Problem, Change, Release, and Knowledge management.
• Ability to drive automation, monitoring, and proactive service improvement.
• Excellent communication with senior stakeholders, regulators, vendors and partners.

Responsibilities

• Own the day-to-day operations of production applications and services.
• Ensure availability, performance, stability, and compliance with service targets.
• Monitor operational health and proactively identify risks and mitigations.
• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and permanent remediation actions.
• Oversee production deployments, releases, and infrastructure changes with risk controls.
• Drive governance, automation, and KPI reporting to improve reliability.

Skills

Leadership

ITIL Service Mgmt

Incident Mgmt

Change Mgmt

Automation / SRE

Stakeholder Mgmt

Tools

Grafana

Prometheus

ELK Stack

Dynatrace

AppDynamics

Kubernetes

Job description

• Lead the operations of Malaysia's national payment infrastructure, supporting services relied upon by millions of users daily.
• Build and mature an Application Support function that enables highly available, resilient, and secure payment services.
• Drive operational excellence across mission-critical payment platforms through automation, governance, and continuous improvement.
• Shape operational standards and technology practices that support Malaysia's accelerating digital payments ecosystem.

Why PayNet / Why Now

• Lead the operations of Malaysia's national payment infrastructure, supporting services relied upon by millions of users daily.
• Build and mature an Application Support function that enables highly available, resilient, and secure payment services.
• Drive operational excellence across mission-critical payment platforms through automation, governance, and continuous improvement.
• Shape operational standards and technology practices that support Malaysia's accelerating digital payments ecosystem.

TL; DR

• Own the end-to-end Application Support function for PayNet's business-critical platforms.
• Lead teams responsible for production support, incident management, problem management, change management, and service reliability.
• Partner with Engineering, Infrastructure, Cyber Security, Product, and Business teams to ensure stable, secure, and high-performing services.
• Drive operational excellence through automation, governance, process optimization, and people leadership.

Why This Role Matters

• Ensure PayNet's mission-critical applications remain highly available, scalable, and resilient.
• Lead the response and recovery of major production incidents while driving permanent corrective actions.
• Establish service management disciplines, operational governance, and support standards that improve reliability and customer confidence.
• Build a high-performing Application Support organization with strong technical ownership and operational excellence.
• Serve as the operational bridge between Technology and Business to support evolving business and regulatory requirements.

What You Will Actually Do

Lead Application Support Operations

• Own the day-to-day operations of production applications and services.
• Ensure availability, performance, stability, and compliance with service level targets.
• Monitor operational health and proactively identify service risks.

Drive Incident, Problem & Major Incident Management

• Lead production incident response and service restoration activities.
• Establish escalation paths and incident governance frameworks.
• Conduct root cause analysis and drive preventive remediation initiatives.
• Reduce recurring incidents through continuous operational improvement.

Govern Production Change & Release Management

• Oversee production deployments, application releases, and infrastructure changes.
• Ensure operational readiness and risk controls are embedded within release processes.
• Minimize production risks while enabling timely delivery of technology initiatives.

Build Operational Excellence

• Establish support processes, standards, and governance frameworks.
• Drive automation initiatives to improve efficiency and service reliability.
• Develop monitoring, observability, reporting, and KPI capabilities.
• Strengthen operational documentation, knowledge management, and service reporting.

Lead People & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Develop and mentor Application Support leaders and engineers.
• Build a culture of accountability, ownership, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, Architecture, Vendors, and Business stakeholders.
• Drive alignment between operational priorities and business objectives.

Example Of This Role In Practice

• Lead a Severity 1 incident affecting national payment services and coordinate recovery efforts across multiple technology teams.
• Identify recurring production issues through trend analysis and implement permanent corrective actions.
• Introduce automation, monitoring, and predictive alerting capabilities to improve operational visibility and reduce manual effort.
• Lead production readiness reviews for new platform launches and major technology changes.
• Coach Application Support Managers and Engineers to improve technical capability and operational ownership.
• Improve service reliability through proactive risk management, governance, and continuous improvement initiatives.

What Will Help You Succeed

Required

Leadership In Enterprise Application Support

• Proven experience leading Application Support, Production Support, or Service Operations teams supporting business-critical platforms.
• Experience operating within high-availability environments governed by strict service level commitments.

Incident, Problem & Service Management

• Strong expertise in ITIL Service Management practices.
• Deep experience managing Incident, Problem, Change, Release, Knowledge, and Major Incident processes.
• Proven track record of improving operational maturity and service reliability.

Technical Breadth

• Strong understanding of enterprise applications, APIs, middleware, databases, networking, cloud platforms, and infrastructure services.
• Ability to lead technical decision-making during complex production incidents.

Stakeholder & Vendor Management

• Experience working with senior business leaders, technology stakeholders, regulators, vendors, and external partners.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management capabilities during both operational and strategic engagements.

Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement

• Experience defining operational KPIs, service metrics, and reporting frameworks.
• Proven ability to drive automation, service improvement, organizational effectiveness, and operational efficiency.
• Strong leadership capabilities in building and developing high-performing teams.

Good To Have

Financial Services / Payments Industry Experience

• Experience supporting payment platforms, banking systems, or other mission-critical regulated environments.
• Understanding of high-availability requirements within financial services operations.

Cloud & Modern Platform Operations

• Experience supporting cloud-native platforms and modern application architectures.
• Exposure to Kubernetes, containers, microservices, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices.

Monitoring & Observability

• Experience with enterprise monitoring and observability platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Splunk, Dynatrace, or AppDynamics.
• Ability to leverage operational data for proactive service management.

Security, Audit & Regulatory Compliance

• Understanding of cybersecurity controls, disaster recovery, business continuity, audit requirements, and regulatory compliance expectations.
• Experience operating within highly controlled enterprise environments.

Automation & Digital Operations

• Experience driving automation through scripting, orchestration, self-healing platforms, or AIOps initiatives.
• Proven ability to reduce manual operational effort while improving service reliability and scalability.