Lead Client Support Specialist, Card Operations

Job Summary

The Lead Client Support Specialist serves as the senior technical resource within the Cards Support team. This role provides advanced troubleshooting expertise across the full card lifecycle — including authorization, clearing and settlement, disputes and chargebacks, BIN and card profile configuration, tokenization, and network message flows (ISO 8583). The Lead oversees complex escalations, supports the Client Support Manager in ensuring consistent service delivery and operational effectiveness, and acts as the trusted technical bridge between clients, Engineering, Product, and Network Operations.

• Provide technical leadership and day-to-day guidance to Tier 1 and Tier 2 Support Specialists.
• Serve as an escalation point for complex technical and system-related issues.
• Assist the Client Support Manager with onboarding and training of new team members.
• Provide input regarding team performance, skill development, and training needs.
• Support quality assurance initiatives within the support function.

• Support the Client Support Manager in maintaining service delivery standards and ensuring the team meets SLA targets (90% or greater).
• Coordinate and lead the support team during Sev1–Sev2 card incidents — authorization outages, settlement failures, widespread decline events — ensuring clear communication between Tier 1, Tier 2, development teams, and clients.
• Assist support engineers in troubleshooting complex card and network-related issues impacting clients.
• Act as Support Incident Commander on Sev-1/Sev-2 calls; communicate impact to clients and write client-facing Root Cause Analyses (RCAs).
• Facilitate post-incident reviews and root cause documentation to improve service reliability.

• Serve as the subject matter expert for cards support engineers on the issuer processing platform, card lifecycle, and network operations.
• Maintain deep working knowledge of key cards platform components including:
  • Authorization processing and ISO 8583 message flows
  • Clearing, settlement, and reconciliation
  • Disputes, chargebacks, and network representment rules
  • BIN management, card profile configuration, and tokenization
  • STIP behavior, response codes, and network connectivity
  • Provide guidance to support engineers on complex issues involving card configuration, network rule interpretation, and data integrity.
  • Assist in training and onboarding of new support team members and new client implementations.
  • Stay current on Visa / Mastercard mandates and flag operational impact to the team early.

• Assist support staff in analyzing authorization logs, settlement files, and network message data to identify discrepancies impacting client operations.
• Support troubleshooting of advanced technical issues using SQL and log-querying tools (Splunk, Kibana, Datadog, or similar).
• Coordinate with Engineering, Product, Risk, and Network Operations teams to validate fixes and communicate outcomes to support staff and clients.

• Act as the primary escalation point for Tier 1 and Tier 2 support engineers for complex card lifecycle and network-related issues.
• Facilitate communication between support staff, clients, product development, QA, and leadership during critical incidents.
• Provide structured updates to the Client Support Manager on escalations, risks, and operational concerns.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Network Operations to turn recurring client pain into permanent fixes — tooling, runbooks, product changes, or network rule clarifications.

• Author and maintain the team’s runbooks, decision trees, and internal knowledge base for common card lifecycle and exception scenarios.
• Identify opportunities to improve support workflows, escalation processes, and operational efficiency.
• Promote best practices across the support team to improve issue resolution consistency and client satisfaction.
• Own team-level SLAs and operational KPIs (time-to-first-response, time-to-resolution, CSAT, escalation rate); report weekly to the…