Head of Application Support

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.