By Michael Vogiatzis — Chief Technology Officer, OKTO 

In Brazil, money moves at the speed of a text message. A Pix transfer goes from intent to settlement in a few seconds. In Mexico, digital wallets and bank transfers come alive at dawn, on holidays, and even in the middle of a football final. In this environment, “business hours” are a fiction. 

For OKTO, this reality didn’t just alter SLAs — it forced us to rethink what engineering means in a region where payments are always on, always local, and always under pressure. The answer wasn’t a bigger support queue or a more elaborate on-call rotation. The answer was a 24/7 engineering function embedded directly into the platform’s architecture, logic, and operations — built for LATAM’s tempo instead of expecting LATAM to adapt to ours. 

The Problem with “24/7 Support” 

In LATAM, traffic doesn’t peak politely at lunchtime — it surges at midnight during a derby match, at 3 a.m. on a long weekend, and during sudden bank updates that arrive without warning. In a region where payments move at the speed of a message and milliseconds directly influence approval rates, the classic model of one engineer on call, a handful of alerts, and a ticketing system breaks down. Local rails behave differently in each country, regulators and banks operate on their own rhythms, and in moments like Black Friday — when transaction volumes skyrocket within minutes and every millisecond matters — traditional “support models” simply can’t keep up. That’s why continuous engineering stops being a differentiator and becomes essential.

So our question changed. Instead of “How do we cover nights and weekends?” we began asking, “How do we embed engineering into the region’s rhythm?” 

That shift reshaped everything. The team we needed had to react instantly when latency curves drifted, understand the payment grammar of each market, detect failure patterns before they turned into outages, and own outcomes end to end rather than simply passing incidents along. In short, we needed a structure that behaved like Latin America itself — fast, fluid, and unforgiving of gaps. 

A team designed like a distributed system 

Centralizing such a team in one city or one office would have been a contradiction. The platform is distributed; the people running it had to be as well. 

Engineers are spread across time zones, but they don’t work as isolated “shifts.” They operate as a continuous relay where context is the shared asset: handovers are as engineered as failover paths, and no incident arrives “cold” to the next person. 

Under the hood, the model rests on a few non‑negotiables:

1. Observability as a live conversation, not a wall of graphs

Monitoring is not a screen in a NOC; it is a fabric woven into every layer of the stack. Telemetry, behavioral signals, and latency probes are embedded close to where decisions are made. 

The team isn’t waiting for a red alert. They are watching: 

• how a specific bank in one country behaves under surge 

• how one PSP’s performance drifts over an hour 

• how approval curves bend after a regulatory or scheme change 

Patterns show up as questions first, not alarms. That’s the moment to act.

2. Playbooks that are actually muscle memory

For every recurring scenario — a bank going intermittently offline, a PSP degrading, a merchant doubling volumes overnight — there is a pre-agreed path. 

These playbooks are not PDFs; they are living runbooks the team practices and refines what to route where, in which order; what to throttle, what to prioritize; what to tell merchants and when. 

The aim is to spend as little cognitive energy as possible on the “known unknowns,” so capacity is free for the truly new problems.

3. Full-stack accountability, not layered escalation

Nothing that happens at 02:00 stays at 02:00. Overnight incidents flow back into core engineering: new safeguards, new dashboards, better routing rules, more automation. 24/7 engineers don’t sit in a narrow operational box. They have enough access and context to: 

• touch infrastructure knobs when needed 

• adjust routing and risk decisions 

• understand the payment logic and settlement paths behind the metrics 

• see dependencies inside and outside OKTO’s boundary 

When something breaks, the default motion is to fix — not to find someone else to own it. 

What This Changes for Merchants 

From the outside, integrating with OKTO can look like connecting to an API. In practice, what merchants plug into is an engineering function that watches their performance continuously and responds before degradation becomes visible. Approval rates rise not because of static optimizations but because routing adapts to live conditions across banks, processors, and payment rails. Outages become shorter and rarer because many issues are resolved when they’re still just “strange behavior,” long before they turn into operational failures. 

Launches become smoother for the same reason. When a new merchant goes live, the monitoring infrastructure, the routing intelligence, and the operational reflexes are already in place. There is no need to wait for the first high-traffic moment to understand how the system behaves under pressure.

And during irregular peaks — major sports events, gaming promotions, payday behavior that varies by country — the platform absorbs the impact without merchants needing to re-architect around regional volatility. What they experience instead is something surprisingly rare in LATAM: operational calm.

For merchants across LATAM and beyond the outcome is clear: higher resilience, smarter routing, and performance that keeps pace with constant movement. What you plug into isn’t just an API – it’s an engineering culture built for markets that never stop.

From Continuous Response to Continuous Adaptation 

The next stage of this evolution is clear. A 24/7 team that reacts quickly is powerful, but a system that adapts autonomously is transformative. We are moving toward a model where traffic reroutes itself dynamically based on the real-time performance of banks and PSPs, where predictive signals warn of abnormal patterns before KPIs shift, and where infrastructure recovers automatically within defined guardrails tailored to each country’s payment reality.

This evolution goes far beyond on-call rotations. It marks a structural shift powered by a platform that monitors, learns, and adapts to each country’s payment rails in real time. Our engineering relay operates across time zones with shared context, acting before irregularities become incidents. Overnight events feed directly into stronger routing, smarter automation, and tighter safeguards. The result is operational stability during the moments that matter most, from major sports peaks to payday surges, e-commerce bursts, and holiday traffic.

If LATAM never stops, optimization shouldn’t either. Reliability is not a department or a schedule. It is a culture — one that stays awake with the markets it serves. 

OKTO’s 24/7 engineering function was built for that purpose. And it will continue to evolve as fast as the region demands.