POSITION SUMMARY
Bancontact Company is the leading provider of payment experiences in Belgium, actively promoting a digital payments (r)evolution in the market. With our Bancontact Pay app, and the bank apps integrating our products, we serve more than 6 million users that want to pay digitally online, in-store or with family and friends. Bancontact Company develops new payment experiences for its consumers and merchants that want to bring forward the way of paying mobile.
In order to bring the pace of these evolutions to the next level, we are looking for an IT Operations Manager.
Are you a proud user of our app or want to start participating in our digital evolution? Join our driven and enthusiastic team!
As IT Operations Manager you report to the Chief Technology Officer.
Job location: Brussels
RESPONSIBILITIES:
The IT Operations Manager sits within the Architecture, Technology and Security (ATS) department, which is organised around three strategic pillars:
FAST covers everything that keeps the platform running and responsive in real time: incident detection, crisis coordination, rapid response to service degradation, and merchant-facing operations continuity. Speed of reaction and quality of communication under pressure are the defining competencies here.
CORE is about structural solidity and operational consistency. It covers infrastructure monitoring, SLA governance, provider performance tracking, process standardisation, and the ongoing effort to unify BC's currently fragmented observability landscape under a single Monitoring panel. Where FAST is reactive, CORE is systemic: it ensures the platform is measurable, governable, and improvable over time.
SECURE ensures that operational practices remain compliant with the regulatory and security frameworks BC operates under: DORA, PCI-DSS, and the internal security standards governed by the (C)ISO function. Monitoring coverage, incident documentation, and process maturity all feed directly into BC's compliance posture.
The IT Operations Manager role spans all three pillars. Day-to-day, the weight sits on FAST and CORE: owning incidents end-to-end and keeping infrastructure performance visible and governed. The Monitoring unification project is a CORE initiative with SECURE implications: replacing fragmented, inconsistent monitoring with a single source of truth, instrumented via agents and API integrations, covering the full BC ecosystem from Switch to tokenisation platform to mobile infrastructure.
1. Incident Management (FAST + CORE)
End-to-end incident ownership for BC services
o Take ownership of any incident affecting BC services from detection (via monitoring or stakeholder report) through qualification, coordination, resolution, and post-mortem closure.
o Align with external and internal stakeholders to understand root cause and agree on a remediation path.
o Activate and coordinate crisis mode for P1/P2/Px incidents; maintain clear and structured internal communication to BC management and impacted parties throughout.
o Ensure post-incident reviews produce actionable outcomes: confirmed root causes, corrective actions assigned, residual risks formally accepted or disclosed.
o Draft and distribute incident reports and post-mortems to the relevant ecosystem (internal management, scheme partners, regulators where applicable).
o Report monthly incident status to the BC management team: volume, severity distribution, MTTR, recurring patterns, and open corrective actions.
2. Infrastructure Monitoring and SLA Follow-up (CORE)
Availability, performance, and contractual governance
o Follow up closely the availability and performance of the BC infrastructure: Bancontact Switch, e-commerce Directory, Mobile infrastructure, Tokenisation Platform, etc.
o Monitor and report SLA performance for all relevant providers; flag breaches, near-misses, and degradation trends proactively to the relevant teams.
o Prepare and lead provider governance conversations on operational performance: bring data, identify improvement levers, and track commitments to closure.
o Maintain the SLA catalogue: current contractual targets per provider, measurement methodology, reporting cadence, and escalation thresholds.
o Report SLA status to BC management team on a monthly basis.
o Coordinate communication on planned maintenance towards internal and external ecosystem.
3. Observability Unification Project (CORE)
Strategic workstream: unified Datadog monitoring panel
o Lead the build-out of a single, authoritative observability panel in Monitoring tools, consolidating metrics, logs, and traces currently spread across fragmented tooling.
o Define and implement the instrumentation strategy: Monitoring agents deployed via servers for containerised workloads, API-based integrations for external or legacy components.
o Establish a standardised alerting taxonomy across BC: severity tiers, ownership routing, and escalation paths aligned to incident response procedures and provider SLA obligations.
o Drive consolidation by migrating or retiring point monitoring solutions where Monitoring provides equivalent or superior coverage.
o Coordinate with infrastructure teams and engineering to ensure agent deployment and pipeline health across environments.
4. Continuous Improvement (CORE + SECURE)
Process maturity and operational standardisation
o Regularly review and improve incident management, monitoring, and alerting processes; document procedures and ensure team knowledge transfer.
o Proactively surface infrastructure performance insights to internal stakeholders (CTO, ISO, product owners) to feed structural improvements to platform and processes.
o Contribute to the ATS operational roadmap: propose and size improvements in observability coverage, alert quality, runbook maturity, and on-call processes.
o Ensure monitoring and incident practices support DORA compliance requirements (ICT incident reporting, concentration risk visibility) and PCI-DSS operational controls.
5. PSP Operations Back-up (FAST)
Merchant-facing operations coverage
o Act as Operations Manager for BC's direct PSP activities (own merchant portfolio) when the primary PSP Operations Manager is unavailable.
o Intervene in the operations of the merchant integration service (first-line technical onboarding under Bancontact Pro) as needed.
WITH THESE SKILLS AND MINDSET, YOU WILL THRIVE IN OUR TEAM
We are looking for a highly motivated candidate, willing to convey our brand values in everything he/she undertakes in his/her daily job.
Technical
* Hands-on experience with Datadog (or other): dashboards, monitors, log management, APM
* Familiarity with Kubernetes: understanding of pod/node instrumentation, agent DaemonSets
* API integration literacy: REST, webhooks, monitoring pipeline configuration
* Understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, etc) and hybrid architectures
* Knowledge of payment systems is a strong asset (scheme operations, HSMs, tokenisation, 3DS)
Operational and Interpersonal
* Master degree or equivalent proven experience; 5 years or more in IT Operations or Service Delivery
* Structured incident management: ability to qualify fast, prioritise, and coordinate under pressure
* Strong communicator across audiences: technical detail for engineers, concise status for management
* Analytical: able to detect patterns across incidents and provider data, translate to improvement actions
* Fluent English required; Dutch and/or French a strong asset
WHAT WE OFFER YOU
You will join a team of professionals with a shared mission: we are dedicated to bring easy and leading-edge payment experiences for the Belgium community while ensuring the highest level of security and compliance with industry regulations.
Yes, that’s quite the challenge. But rest assured, you can rely on your colleagues. We are proud of our welcoming, positive, and innovative environment!
We offer you a salary package in line with your competences and experience, and the possibility to grow your skillset based on your ambitions. We support hybrid working via fixed office days per team. Moreover, you’re always welcome to work from our office, where you can enjoy fresh fruit, morning conversations at the coffee machine and of course our company events.
Bancontact Company is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration regardless of gender, origin, disability, age, or any other diversity criteria. If you need any accommodations during the recruitment process, please let us know.
Interested to join us? Then send your CV and cover letter to jobs@bancontact.com