Technical support engineer

VGS is the world's leader in payment tokenization. Large banks, aspiring fintechs, and growing merchants embed our universal token vault into their technology stack to manage the complexities of payment data tokenization across processors and networks, open banking, card issuance, omnichannel loyalty, PCI compliance, payment orchestration, and more. We empower our clients and partners by tokenizing sensitive payment data, limiting compliance scope, and consolidating payments to unlock revenue and business opportunities.

VGS provides processor-agnostic tokenization solutions via secure universal token vaults, iframes, mobile SDKs, tokenization proxies, APIs, and data orchestration tooling to support payment acceptance, card issuance, PII and bank account tokenization, and other payments value-added services. Some of the use cases we enable include multi-processor Network Tokenization, Account Updater, payment orchestration, secure settlement file processing, 3DS, and Risk provider connectivity.

The majority of this role is hands-on technical work: debugging, troubleshooting network and integration issues, onboarding new customers, and resolving tickets. The remainder is operational ownership and cross-team coordination. The support team plays a vital role in translating between our Engineering and Go-To-Market teams (including account management and sales). During incidents, outages, escalations, and planned maintenance, you are the primary on-shift decision-maker for PT business hours: you decide whether an incident goes on the public status page, approve the wording of customer notifications, set maintenance timing, and coordinate as needed with the GTM teams so that they are aware of any impacts to their clients. These decisions sit with leadership today, and we want them to be owned within Support. They come up infrequently but are time-sensitive and customer-visible.

What you will be doing at VGS (Responsibilities)...

• Serve as the senior decision-maker for the Support team during PT business hours. Escalations, judgment calls, and approvals land with you. You're the person on shift with the standing to decide, not to route.
• Own incident and maintenance communications. Assess severity and customer impact, decide when to post to the public status page, write or approve the wording, including team drafts, and keep it up to date through resolution.
• Set and coordinate maintenance timing. Choose windows based on real customer traffic patterns and regional load, negotiate them with engineering, inform internal client-facing teams about and make sure the notice goes out with enough lead time for customers to plan.
• Coordinate multi-team projects where Support is a stakeholder: migrations, deprecations, launches, and customer-specific rollouts. Track dependencies and keep the parties honest about status.
• Debug deeply. Reproduce issues with cURL and Postman, read logs, and trace requests across VGS infrastructure, customer systems, and downstream gateways. Diagnose network problems independently: DNS, TCP/IP, routing, timeouts, connection resets, and TLS/SSL handshake failures.
• Resolve an issue, find a workaround, or escalate with a bug report good enough for engineering to act on immediately.
• Drive mid-tier and long tail customer integrations from kickoff to go-live, coordinating between customer engineers and internal teams.
• Write up nontrivial investigations as internal runbooks or public documentation.
• Prepare and deliver customer training, building the material where it doesn't exist.
• Meet SLA and quality targets, and help the team meet theirs.
• Participate in the weekend on-call rotation (every 3rd weekend, Saturday and Sunday, 8:00–20:00 PT). On-call is monitoring coverage, not a full working day — you respond to urgent incidents and time-sensitive requests, while routine tickets wait for the next business day.

What we are looking for from you (Requirements)...

• 5+ years in Technical Support, Solutions Engineering, Technical Account Management, or Technical Project Management — with at least some of it in a senior or lead capacity.
• Experience owning customer-facing incident or maintenance communication. You will be writing status page updates, incident notices, and escalation emails. You understand the difference between transparency and alarm.
• Strong internal communication skills. You will be the translation layer between customers, VGS account management, and VGS product and engineering. You should be able to operate in different contexts and understand how to translate between the technical, operations, and business contexts of conversations to ensure context is not lost between stakeholders.
• Autonomy. You are comfortable deciding and then reporting, rather than checking first. You'll have a few hours of overlap with your manager each day and spend the rest of your shift as the main decision-maker.
• Strong command of HTTP, REST APIs, and proxies. Independent network debugging — DNS, TCP/IP, routing, connectivity, TLS/SSL handshakes. Be ready to describe a specific problem you diagnosed and how you narrowed it down.
• English at C1 or above, written and spoken. You'll be writing text that customers and executives read, under time pressure.
• Willingness to work PT business hours on a sustained basis.
• Nice to have Payments background: acquirers, issuers, gateways, network tokenization, 3DS, PCI-DSS, SOC 2.
• Reading and debugging code in at least one of Python, Go, Java, or a similar language. You won't ship production code.
• A Computer Science, Engineering, or Math degree.

$80,000 - $110,000 a year

What you get from us...

• Flexible work hours and flexible PTO
• Competitive health benefits
• VGS stock options
• 401k plan, with employer matching 4% and immediate vesting (available only for US employees)
• Life & disability insurance
• Pre-tax flexible spending accounts, dependent and healthcare FSA (available only for US employees)
• Global parental leave program
• Employee Assistance Program
• Home Internet reimbursement
• New hire home office set-up allowance
• Professional learning reimbursement

At VGS, we have a remote-first philosophy because we believe flexibility leads to great work and a healthy work-life balance. That said, if you live within 30 miles of one of our office locations, you’ll be on a hybrid schedule with some in-person time—because we know there’s real value in coming together. We’re not about being in the office every day—but we are about connection, collaboration, and the energy that comes from a great brainstorm, a team lunch, or celebrating a big win in person.

We consider applicants without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, marital status, physical or mental disability, or other protected classes under all local, state, and federal laws and ordinances (AA/EOE/W/M/Vet/Disabled). Qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for the position in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Please note we are currently only hiring in the following states... Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Ontario (Canada), Alberta (Canada), or British Columbia (Canada).

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.