Sustaining Engineer

For over four decades, PAR Technology Corporation (NYSE: PAR) has been a leader in restaurant technology, empowering brands worldwide to create lasting connections with their guests. Our innovative solutions and commitment to excellence provide comprehensive software and hardware that enable seamless experiences and drive growth for over 100,000 restaurants in more than 110 countries. Embracing our "Better Together" ethos, we offer Unified Customer Experience solutions, combining point-of-sale, digital ordering, loyalty and back-office software solutions as well as industry-leading hardware and drive-thru offerings. To learn more, visit partech.com or connect with us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

PAR is seeking a highly skilled Sustaining Engineer to join the technical backbone of the Punchh platform. This engineering-led role ensures the health, stability, and scalability of Punchh's production systems, supporting the restaurant brands and their guests who rely on it every day.

You will be hands-on in resolving complex production issues at the code level, conducting root cause analysis, and implementing architectural and process improvements to meet service-level objectives (SLOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs). You will work closely with Engineering, Product, DevOps, and Customer Success teams, and your findings will regularly be communicated onward to the restaurant brands we serve.

Please note: this role requires sustained working overlap with North America business hours, and includes ownership of recurring daily and weekly operational duties described below. Please read the "How This Role Actually Works" section carefully before applying.

Unleash Your Potential

Punchh is a customer loyalty and engagement platform for restaurant brands. The majority of the issues you will investigate fall into these areas:

• Loyalty campaigns — segmentation, mass gifting, recall and anniversary campaigns, scheduled sends, control groups, and campaign performance reporting.

• Loyalty mechanics — points earning and expiry, redeemables, rewards balances, tiers, and guest-level data integrity.

• Integrations — POS systems, online ordering providers, payment processors, and marketing/messaging platforms.

• Platform reliability — database performance under campaign load, notification delivery, API availability, and authentication flows.

Prior experience in loyalty, marketing automation, or restaurant technology is a significant advantage. Candidates whose background is purely generic backend or infrastructure work, without exposure to campaign or customer-data platforms, will find the ramp steeper.

How This Role Actually Works

Beyond project and escalation work, this role carries standing operational ownership. We want to be explicit about this, because it is a meaningful part of the week:

• Daily monitoring and reporting — you will own the daily campaign load report and a forward-looking overload forecast covering multiple production stacks, and publish it to the engineering team each morning.

• Alert triage ownership — you will be the first responder for automated alerts across campaign, worker SLO, and application error channels. Engineers and product teams will tag you directly and rely on your judgment to distinguish a genuine failure from expected noise.

• Weekly operational communications — production maintenance summaries and technical updates for the Customer Success team.

• Remediation execution — running and validating data-fix and bulk-gifting scripts against live production data, often affecting thousands to hundreds of thousands of guest records, with appropriate care, checkpointing, and verification.

These duties do not stop when a project is busy. Reliability here comes from someone doing the unglamorous things consistently.

Key Responsibilities

Engineering-Led Issue Resolution

• Act as the final escalation point for complex, cross-system production issues impacting integrations or customer-facing features.

• Lead incident bridges for high-severity events, acting as technical incident commander and driving timely root cause analysis (RCA), postmortems, and recovery.

• Investigate campaign and loyalty defects end to end — from a brand's report through segment, scheduling, delivery, and reporting layers — to a defensible root cause.

Code-Level Debugging & Platform Stewardship

• Perform deep root cause analysis across APIs, integrations, and microservices using logs, telemetry, SQL queries, and source-level debugging.

• Contribute directly to the codebase with fixes, refactors, and stability improvements, collaborating with development teams for safe rollouts.

• Maintain a comprehensive understanding of Punchh's platform architecture, data flows, and infrastructure to support ongoing reliability efforts.

Data Remediation & Script Execution

• Design, review, and execute remediation scripts to correct guest-level data — missed gifting, incorrect point balances, duplicate transactions, and reward corrections.

• Validate scope and counts before execution and verify results afterwards; work within platform constraints such as job runtime limits using checkpointing and resumable approaches.

• Exercise appropriate caution and secure sign-off before any operation that modifies production guest data at scale.

Technical Leadership for Integrations

• Serve as the engineering lead for third-party integrations (POS, online ordering, payment processors, marketing platforms), ensuring compliance, reliability, and quality.

• Validate and certify partner integrations through code review, API validation (leveraging Postman where appropriate), and architecture alignment.

• Define and enforce integration best practices and standards across the platform ecosystem.

Operational Excellence, ITIL & Automation

• Leverage Databricks for scheduled job analysis, performance tuning, and large-scale data troubleshooting.

• Use New Relic and other observability tools to monitor application health, detect anomalies, and proactively identify system issues.

• Maintain and evolve technical runbooks, diagnostic playbooks, and integration guidelines to reduce future escalations.

• Apply ITIL best practices for incident, problem, and change management to improve process consistency.

• Identify opportunities to automate triage, alerting, and recovery workflows, reducing manual effort and improving mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR).

Brand-Facing Technical Communication

A distinctive part of this role: technical findings frequently need to reach the restaurant brands we serve. You will be expected to:

• Translate technical root causes into clear, accurate explanations that Customer Success can take to a brand — including drafting the customer-facing wording.

• Be precise about what is known, what is not known, and what cannot be determined, rather than over-claiming under pressure.

• Distinguish clearly between platform defects, configuration issues on the brand's side, and expected behavior — and communicate that distinction diplomatically.

• Contribute to formal RCA documents delivered to brands following significant incidents.

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing

• Collaborate with Engineering, Product, DevOps, and Customer Success teams to identify systemic trends and implement platform-level improvements.

• Represent Sustaining Engineering in release planning, readiness reviews, and go-live support.

• Mentor Tier 2 teams, share knowledge, and help build organizational capability to reduce escalations over time.

What We are Looking For

Technical Expertise

• 5+ years in sustaining engineering, production support, or backend development in SaaS or platform environments.

• Strong Ruby on Rails experience — the Punchh platform is Rails-based, and code-level debugging in Rails is central to this role.

• Strong SQL skills — able to write and optimize queries independently for investigation, impact analysis, and root cause work.

• Advanced experience troubleshooting distributed systems, microservices, and public cloud (AWS preferred).

• Proficiency with RESTful APIs, authentication (OAuth 2.0, JWT), and webhooks.

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), including services such as Lambda, API Gateway, S3, and DynamoDB.

• Skilled in debugging JSON/XML payloads, API logs, and mobile SDK integrations (iOS/Android push notifications).

• Familiarity with SPA frameworks (React, Angular, Vue), networking (DNS, TLS/SSL, VPNs), and security protocols (PCI DSS).

• Understanding of DevOps processes and CI/CD pipelines to support seamless deployments and rollback strategies.

• Understanding of SRE practices, including SLO tracking, error budgets, and postmortem culture.

• Databricks — running scheduled jobs, analyzing large data sets, and troubleshooting performance issues.

• New Relic and comparable observability tooling (Datadog, CloudWatch, Sentry) — monitoring, alerting, and performance analysis.

• Postman — API testing, automation, and validation of integrations.

• Jira or equivalent — managing an escalation queue with defined SLAs.

Additional Skills

• Experience with loyalty, marketing automation, or campaign management platforms.

• Familiarity with restaurant technology — POS systems, online ordering, middleware integrations.

• Experience supporting multi-tenant SaaS where a single defect can affect many customer brands simultaneously.

Professional Skills

• Excellent written communication — able to explain a technical root cause clearly to a non-technical audience, and to draft customer-facing explanations that are accurate and appropriately scoped.

• Strong incident communication skills — able to keep stakeholders aligned during high-pressure events.

• Sound judgment under ambiguity — able to decide independently whether an alert is genuine, when to escalate, and when to act, often outside overlapping working hours.

• Strong organizational and documentation skills; proven ability to reduce friction between teams.

• Reliability and consistency in recurring operational duties.

• Customer-focused with a commitment to continuous improvement and measurable outcomes.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience preferred.

Interview Process

• Interview #1: Phone Screen with Talent Acquisition Team

• Interview #2: Video interview with the Technical Teams (via MS Teams/F2F)

• Interview #3: Video interview with the Hiring Manager (via MS Teams/F2F)

PAR is proud to provide equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetics. We also provide reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities in accordance with applicable laws. If you require reasonable accommodation to complete a job application, pre-employment testing, a job interview or to otherwise participate in the hiring process, or for your role at PAR, please contact accommodations@partech.com.If you’d like more information about your EEO rights as an applicant, please visit the US Department of Labor's website.