2nd-Line Support Engineer (Night/Evening CET)

Experienced 2nd-Line Support Engineer (Trading Platform)

Company: VCG Tech Limited

Location: Remote (Global)

Employment Type: Full-Time · Evening (17:00–02:00 CET) or Night (01:00–10:00 CET) shift

Role Purpose

As a 2nd-Line Support Engineer, you own the technical investigation and resolution of production issues on a live online trading platform. Sitting between 1st-line support and engineering, you take escalations across the trading, payments, and introducing-broker (IB) / partner systems, reproduce and triage problems, perform root-cause analysis, and drive each issue to a resolution or a clean, well-documented hand-off. In a brokerage where clients trade CFDs/FX in real time and money moves through deposits and withdrawals, fast and accurate diagnosis directly protects client trust and revenue.

Day to day you work hands-on: reading application logs, querying relational databases with SQL to verify what actually happened to an order, payment, or partner record, writing light scripts to gather evidence, and watching monitoring dashboards and alerts to catch issues before clients do. You run incidents calmly, keep stakeholders informed in clear non-technical language, and escalate to engineering only when needed, with findings documented well enough that an engineer can pick up where you left off. You collaborate closely with 1st-line support, product teams, and backend engineers, and you work remotely as part of a distributed support function reporting into engineering/support leadership.

Working Hours & Coverage

This is a shift-based role. We run a three-engineer rota that keeps our support desk covered across extended hours, Monday to Friday, for a live trading platform. We are now hiring for the two shifts:
 

- Evening shift: 17:00–02:00 CET

- Night shift: 01:00–10:00 CET
 

You will be assigned to one of these shifts, and we ask that you state which one you can commit to when you apply. The shifts are designed to overlap by about an hour at each handover, so issues are passed over live between engineers rather than only through written notes. The role is fully remote, but your working hours must reliably and consistently overlap your assigned shift in CET/EET, so we are looking for candidates in compatible timezones. Reasonable rotation between the evening and night shifts, and occasional weekend cover, may apply.

Key Responsibilities

• Escalation Handling & Investigation

- Take escalations from 1st-line support across trading, payments, and partner/IB systems, and own them to resolution or hand-off

- Reproduce reported issues, isolate the failing component, and distinguish user error, data issues, and genuine defects

- Analyse application and service logs to trace transactions end-to-end and pinpoint where behaviour diverged

- Query relational databases with SQL to verify account, order, payment, and partner data against expected state

- Use light scripting (Python/Bash) to collect evidence, parse logs, and automate repetitive diagnostic steps

• Root-Cause Analysis & Resolution
   

- Perform structured root-cause analysis and document a clear chain of evidence for each issue

- Apply known fixes and follow runbooks to resolve recurring problems within the support remit

- Escalate to engineering with concise, well-documented findings, reproduction steps, and supporting data

- Identify patterns across tickets and flag systemic issues, gaps, or fragile areas for permanent fixes

- Contribute to and improve runbooks and knowledge-base articles so resolutions are repeatable
 

• Incident Management & Communication
   

- Act as a calm point of coordination during incidents, driving triage, severity assessment, and timely updates

- Keep stakeholders informed with clear, jargon-free status updates appropriate to a live trading environment

- Coordinate with engineering and product teams to confirm impact, mitigations, and resolution

- Write up post-incident notes and follow-up actions, and track them to closure
 

• Monitoring, Alerting & Ticket Discipline

- Monitor dashboards and alerts to detect and triage issues proactively, before they reach clients

- Maintain disciplined, well-documented ticket handling in Jira with accurate status, context, and history

- Tune and act on alerts, reducing noise and surfacing the signals that matter

- Track recurring issues and feed insights back into monitoring, runbooks, and engineering backlogs

• Required Experience & Skills

- Several years of experience in a 2nd-line, application, or production support role for a live, business-critical software product

- Strong, methodical troubleshooting skills with a proven track record of root-cause analysis under pressure

- Confident writing SQL to investigate and validate data in relational databases (joins, filtering, aggregation)

- Comfortable reading and correlating application logs to trace issues across multiple services

- Hands-on scripting ability in Python and/or Bash for diagnostics, log parsing, and automation

- Practical experience with log and monitoring/observability tooling (e.g. Grafana, Prometheus, CloudWatch or similar)

- Disciplined ticket and incident management, including clear documentation and structured escalation to engineering

- Experience with Jira (or equivalent) and an organised, detail-oriented approach to queue and SLA management

- Excellent written and verbal communication, able to translate technical detail for non-technical stakeholders

- Self-directed and reliable in a remote, distributed team across the full investigate-resolve-handover cycle

• Nice to Have
   

- Domain experience in online trading, CFDs/FX, brokerage, or fintech

- Familiarity with the MetaTrader 5 platform from a support or operations perspective

- Exposure to payments support, including deposit and withdrawal flows

- Understanding of introducing-broker / partner / affiliate programs and multi-level partner commission or rebate concepts

- Basic AWS or general cloud literacy and an understanding of microservices and event-driven systems

- Previous on-call or rota-based incident response experience

- Familiarity with REST APIs and message queues when investigating cross-service issues