System Support Specialist

When a payment fails at 21:00 on a Saturday, you are the person who finds out why.

Howler runs ticketing, cashless payments and the event app for some of South Africa's biggest live experiences — Ultra South Africa, Comic Con Africa, Black Coffee Weekender, MTN Bushfire. Money moves through our platform while the crowd is in the venue. When something breaks, it is rarely theoretical: a settlement file that did not arrive, a gateway that stopped authorising, a report that shows a blank where a number should be.

We are hiring a System Support Specialist to hold that line. You are the first person on the problem — triaging it, reproducing it, fixing what you can, and handing engineering something they can act on when you cannot.

2+ years in technical support, IT support or systems administration

Working SQL — enough to query transaction and system logs yourself

Familiar with payment concepts (authorisations, refunds, chargebacks, settlement), or fast enough to learn them properly

Ticketing and helpdesk systems — Zendesk, Jira Service Management or similar

Comfortable reading application logs and using basic debugging tools to isolate a fault

Strong written communication — you can explain a technical problem to someone who is not technical, without either talking down or hiding behind jargon

Calm and methodical under pressure, particularly during a live incident affecting money

Bonus: events, ticketing or e-commerce experience

Watch the platform. Monitor ticketing and payment health, respond to alerts, and act on incidents while they are still small.

Own the queue. Triage and resolve issues across transactions, payment failures, account access and platform errors — for internal teams and for organisers.

Escalate well. When it belongs with engineering, it arrives with reproduction steps and diagnostic context, not a screenshot. How you hand something over is most of the job.

Keep the integrations honest. Troubleshoot the third-party payment gateways and ticketing partners we depend on, and notice when one of them changes without telling us.

Chase the discrepancies. Support reconciliation by investigating where transaction records and provider reports disagree — and finding out which one is wrong.

Write it down. Recurring issues, known fixes and standard procedures go into the knowledge base, so the second occurrence costs someone ten minutes instead of an afternoon.

Manage access. User accounts, permissions and access control across internal and customer-facing systems.

Stand by. Participate in the after-hours on-call rotation.

Close the loop. Contribute to post-incident reviews, and push for the process or system change that stops the issue coming back.

Test the changes. Validate upgrades, migrations and new feature rollouts before they meet a live event.