Employment Spot

Job Description

A world leading financial institution is seeking an experienced application support specialist. This is a high profile role within their Equity Trading Division. The group is responsible for all technology that supports equity trading, equity derivative trading, risk management, and prime financial systems that support the institution.

The ideal candidate will have extensive experience working within a highly fast paced trading environment supporting Order Management Systems OMS. You will need to have a strong background with Program Trading, Basket Trading, Block Trading and Algorithmic Trading.

Management Responsibilities:

• Management experience and ability to lead and motivate a regional support team
• Manage the day to day activities of team, prioritize tasks and ensure that deliverables are timely
• Mentor and provide performance expectations and feedback to staff
• Build and maintain an effective, productive relationship with the trading community and represent their interests to the development team
• Meet with development on a regular basis to review outages, systems / functional issues affecting the desk and track their remediation
• Complete operational ownership of the applications supported:  approval all change, oversee all releases, recommend application / architectural / infrastructure improvements, ensure adequate DR is in place, accountable for stability of the overall system.
• Lead during crisis management situations and effectively advise / communicate to traders as well as adequately direct the support team

Job Requirements

• First point of contact to resolve all problems and answer functional questions
• Log and track all user related issues and work requests
• Detailed knowledge of all business flows, the application architecture and the hardware configuration for supported applications
• Provide ad-hoc reporting and investigative support to business managers or compliance staff when existing systems are unable to provide the necessary data for these teams
• Provide application software and hardware support

        o   Troubleshoot and research possible product bugs or failures

        o   Trace transactions through the system and conduct research beyond the basic scripts and monitoring / research tools provided

        o   Monitor applications and their associated hardware throughout the day using existing monitoring tools, identify intraday capacity issues

        o   Write basic to intermediate scripts to support their function

        o   Drive the development of tools needed to provide effective support

        o   Define new operating system, infrastructure, application and business oriented monitoring alerts and coordinate their integration into existing monitoring tools

        o   Escalate all unresolved issues to senior management

• Own the production environment and act as gate keeper for all changes:
  • Approve all new releases and production configuration changes
• Ensure development includes all necessary documentation for each CR:  release notes, test plan + scorecard, backout procedures etc.
• Implement all releases into production, conduct post-release testing
• Execute pre-determined back-out procedures (if required)
• Conduct reviews of all open production items with the dev team
• Conduct post-mortems
• Define and document procedures