Senior IT Operations Engineer

OwnBank; Taguig; On-site; PHP 900,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Own Bank, a leading Philippine digital bank, seeks an experienced Senior IT Operations Engineer to ensure the availability, security, and resilience of its production systems and cloud platforms. You will handle 24x7 monitoring, incident response, and disaster recovery for core banking and payment workloads.

Lead automation efforts, manage Kubernetes/OpenShift containers, and coordinate changes with vendors and governance teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology or related field.
• 5–8 years of IT operations, production support, or DevOps experience.
• Hands-on experience with public or hybrid cloud environments (Kubernetes/OpenShift).

Responsibilities

• Monitor and support production systems 24x7.
• Manage cloud infrastructure and container workloads (Kubernetes/OpenShift/Docker).
• Ensure security, disaster recovery, and compliance controls.
• Lead incident response and post-incident reviews.
• Support CI/CD and change management for production releases.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology or related field

Relevant cloud/IT certifications are an advantage

Job description

Carrying on over 60 years of trust and innovation (originally established as the Rural Bank of Cavite City), Own Bank is a fast-growing digitalized bank in the Philippines regulated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). We combine the stability of traditional banking with cutting-edge fintech innovation to offer seamless, secure, and accessible financial services. As part of our dynamic team, you will help shape the future of digital finance in the Philippines—building smart, data-driven solutions that empower millions of Filipinos to manage and grow their wealth.

Job Description

The Senior IT Operations Engineer is responsible for ensuring the availability, stability, security, performance, and resilience of the Bank’s production systems, cloud infrastructure, and critical technology services. This role combines the responsibilities of cloud infrastructure administration and production system support, covering public or hybrid cloud environments, core banking related workloads, payment systems, middleware, batch processing, monitoring, incident management, disaster recovery, change support, automation, vendor coordination, and BSP audit readiness.

Key Systems and Technology Scope

• Core Banking System and related peripherals
• Accounting Management System
• Payment systems such as PESONet, InstaPay, SWIFT, and related integrations
• Middleware, ESB, MQ, Kafka, APIs, and integration services
• Batch jobs, End-of-Day, End-of-Month, and scheduled processing
• Public cloud platforms
• Hybrid cloud and on-premise infrastructure
• Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker, and containerized workloads
• DR environments, backup systems, monitoring tools, and ITSM platforms

Key Responsibilities

1. Production Systems Operations

• Monitor and support the Bank’s critical production systems on a 24x7 basis.
• Perform daily system health checks for applications, servers, databases, middleware, integrations, and cloud services.
• Monitor End-of-Day, End-of-Month, batch jobs, scheduled processes, and transaction flows.
• Coordinate controlled restarts, failovers, recoveries, and service restoration activities.
• Ensure production systems remain stable, available, and performing within agreed service levels.
• Support critical banking services including core banking, payment channels, regulatory reporting systems, and customer-facing platforms.

2. Cloud Infrastructure Administration

• Provision, configure, operate, and maintain cloud infrastructure resources including compute, storage, networking, and security services.
• Administer VPC/VNet, subnets, routing, firewalls, security groups, load balancers, and connectivity components.
• Manage cloud operating system images, patching, hardening, and baseline configurations.
• Operate container platforms such as Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Docker.
• Support autoscaling, capacity management, performance optimization, and cost monitoring.
• Maintain cloud architecture diagrams, configuration records, and operational documentation.

3. Monitoring, Incident & Problem Management

• Implement and maintain infrastructure, application, cloud, database, and log monitoring.
• Respond to Severity 1, Severity 2, and Severity 3 incidents.
• Act as senior L2 / L3 support for production and cloud-related issues.
• Perform incident triage, root cause analysis, and problem investigation.
• Lead or support post-incident reviews and corrective action tracking.
• Escalate unresolved or recurring issues to vendors, IT management, or governance committees as required.

4. Change, Release & Deployment Support

• Support production deployments, infrastructure changes, cloud releases, and system updates.
• Validate pre-change readiness, implementation steps, backout plans, and rollback procedures.
• Perform post-deployment validation and production smoke testing.
• Support CI/CD pipelines from an infrastructure and operations perspective.
• Ensure changes are implemented in accordance with approved change management procedures.
• Help reduce failed changes, emergency changes, and production disruptions.

5. Security, Access & Compliance Controls

• Assist in enforcing least privilege access, role-based access controls, and segregation of duties.
• Support implementation of encryption for data at rest and in transit.
• Manage or coordinate secrets, keys, certificates, and access-related operational controls.
• Ensure logging, monitoring, and audit trails are enabled, retained, and reviewable.
• Support compliance with BSP IT risk, cybersecurity, cloud, outsourcing, and internal IT governance requirements.
• Assist Information Security and IT Governance teams during access reviews, security assessments, and compliance testing.

6. Availability, Backup, Disaster Recovery & Resilience

• Operate and support high availability infrastructure and application architectures.
• Support disaster recovery strategies such as active-passive, multi-zone, or multi region configurations.
• Validate backup completion, restoration readiness, and recovery procedures.
• Participate in disaster recovery testing and tabletop exercises.
• Ensure critical systems are aligned with approved Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery Point Objectives.
• Document DR test results, recovery gaps, and corrective actions for management, audit, and regulatory review.

7. Automation & Operational Efficiency

• Implement Infrastructure as Code using tools such as Terraform, ARM templates, CloudFormation, or equivalent platforms.
• Automate provisioning, patching, backups, monitoring, and routine operational tasks.
• Improve operational efficiency through scripts, runbooks, standard operating procedures, and reusable deployment patterns.
• Support infrastructure standardization and environment consistency.
• Identify opportunities to improve stability, performance scalability, and cost efficiency.

8. Vendor & Third-Party Coordination

• Coordinate with CBS vendors, cloud service providers, managed service partners, fintech partners, and infrastructure vendors.
• Assist in tracking vendor incidents, SLA performance, escalation status, and remediation commitments.
• Escalate vendor issues according to approved support matrix, contracts, and service agreements.
• Support vendor performance reviews, risk reviews, audits, and regulatory evidence requests.
• Ensure vendor-related operational dependencies are documented and monitored.

9. BSP, Audit & Governance Support

• Support BSP examinations, internal audits, external audits, and IT risk reviews.
• Maintain production logs, incident records, RCA reports, change evidence, access records, monitoring reports, and control documentation.
• Assist in enforcing operational controls aligned with BSP MORB, IT risk management expectations, ITIL, COBIT, and ISO 27001 operational controls.
• Provide timely evidence and explanations for audit and regulatory requests.
• Ensure operations documentation is complete, updated, and properly retained.

10. Senior Engineering Support & Knowledge Sharing

• Provide technical guidance to junior operations engineers, production support analysts, and cloud operations staff.
• Support cross-functional coordination with IT Engineering, IT Governance, Information Security, Risk, Compliance, Product, and business teams.
• Participate in operational readiness reviews for new systems and major releases.
• Help establish runbooks, operational standards, troubleshooting guides, and knowledge base articles.
• Promote a culture of ownership, accountability, reliability, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications

Education

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, Electronics and Communications Engineering, or related field.
• Relevant cloud, infrastructure, security, or IT service management certificationsare an advantage.

Experience

• At least 5 to 8 years of experience in IT operations, production support, cloud administration, systems administration, infrastructure operations, DevOps, or site reliability support.
• Experience supporting banking, fintech, payment systems, core banking systems, middleware, or regulated production environments is preferred.
• Hands-on experience with public cloud or hybrid cloud environments.
• Experience in incident management, change management, monitoring, backup, disaster recovery, and audit support.