Lead Trading Systems Specialist
Location: London, UK
Hands-On Lead Trading Systems Specialist role primarily focused on leading and working side by side with the team to implement and manage Front Office Trading, Electronic Trading Systems, Position Keeping, Booking Systems and Exchange Connectivity Networks. Working as a team, act as the first point of contact for trading support and systems issues.
Overview of Responsibilities:
- Handle configurations, testing, releases, installations, and monitoring of trading applications and the respective back end systems.
- Act as the first point of contact for traders and others within the firm to respond to and investigate trading system issues.
- Perform system and network troubleshooting and hardware resource optimization. Ability to implement these optimizations.
- Communicate with other members of the Support teams world-wide to ensure consistency of tools, information, and processes.
- Understand the regulatory environment ensuring that our systems operate according to our written supervisory procedures and in accordance with the rules of the exchanges.
- Document new procedures; review and improve documentation of existing ones.
- Communicate and work with external parties such as exchanges and vendors, as appropriate.
- Effectively prioritize workload between yourself and the team and react to immediate systems issues with good judgment and credible decision-making.
- Maintain ongoing and growing technical knowledge and learning of yourself and the team.
- Assess support systems to ensure accordance to fundamental rules of supportability, capacity optimization, and system scalability while designing and implementing disaster recovery plans that meet the firm’s organization’s goals, needs, and objectives.
Management Responsibilities:
Personnel Mentoring and Management
- Provide direction to support members on short and long-term plans and assist in strategic planning for high risk projects to deliver and exceed all team performance targets.
- Set goals, objectives and priorities for the team in alignment with overall company plans. Plans, directs, and monitors on-going projects in support.
- Mentor support staff to review, assess, and recommend improvements that will benefit system supportability
- Provide and track plans for professional growth of the individual members of the team
- Schedule and maintain an on-call rotation among all members of the support staff.
Communication
- Train support staff to work with internal teams on system upgrades and maintenance of hardware/software.
- Mentor support staff on how to coordinate assistance from various internal departments and external parties to resolve problems and issues beyond the scope of support team.
- Ensure all support members establish and maintain lines of communication with all departments on reliability and maintenance issues.
- Work with other support managers to ensure operational consistency.
- Build skills in co-workers through cross-training and mentoring, making every interaction as opportunity to learn or teach.
Status Updates and Follow-up
- Manage the day-to-day operations of the trading support staff, overseeing support functions.
- Direct support staffs to follow up and ensure issues are resolved in a timely and professional manner.
- Manage the activities of your team members who are assigned to a project with a focus on accountability of goals, objectives, and operational procedures.
- Conduct weekly status meetings with support staff and prepare and deliver weekly status reports to management.
- Asses support risks and continuously prioritize the risks so that they can be broken down by project task and assigned.
Training on Specific Tasks and Documentation
- Provide direction to support members on daily tasks, outage related issues, and working with various exchanges
- Direct the support staff to ensure collection of accurate and useable documentation.
- Develop and direct your support team to work towards best practices and increased automation of processes, measurement and reporting.
- Ensure that the team is appropriately trained and has sufficient skills to deliver the highest possible quality service when dealing with outages.
- Provide consistent coaching, mentoring and feedback to team members to improve handling of outages transactions, escalations, technical ability, inter-company relations, or other situations as they develop.
- Engage support team members to become subject matter experts who will know the end-to-end operational design and methodology behind the entire trading environment.
- Train and lead support staff to demonstrate their ability to resolve business and service impacting problems while evaluating all alternatives and consulting with other senior technical leaders of the organization.
Identify and Address
- Supervise support team to enable it to respond to situations where standard procedures have failed. Take ownership of failed process, build adequate fixes and procedural checks, and train support staff on the new procedures.
- Contribute to strategic planning for the overall goals.
- Forecast, analyze supportability trends, and create projects for support staff to address.
- Periodically manage special support projects such as new system rollouts and pilot concepts.
- Interact with all levels of technical and managerial staff and will have proven leadership abilities and display excellent skills in understanding problem determination and service restoration.
- Contribute system improvements requiring skill sets unique within the team, but still within the team defined boundaries of owned responsibilities.
Qualifications-Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Exemplary troubleshooting skills
- Excellent understanding of SQL
- Excellent understanding of Linux/Unix including awk, sed, and shell scripting
- Strong understanding of perl and/or Python scripting languages
- Knowledge of version and revision control practices and procedures
- Excellent communication skills, both written and oral
- Familiarity with proprietary trading environments is highly desirable
- Familiarity with financial markets is highly desirable
- Familiarity with regulatory rules associated with trading in financial markets
- Experience with Linux/Unix systems and network administration is highly desirable
- Knowledge of C++ and Windows administration is a plus
- Ability to integrate technical details with the big picture and communicate with other parties to provide satisfactory solutions and ensure customer satisfaction
Responsibilities for Onboarding New Financial Strategies, Instruments, Venues, etc.:
- Drive to increase operational efficiency while reducing time to market.
- Act as Project Manager for your jurisdiction project efforts.
- Ensure that all related parties acknowledge you as central contact and go to person for status updates.
- Provide and participate in weekly/bi-weekly status reports and meetings.
- Provide direction to related parties and hold teams accountable to committed dates/milestones.
- Ensure coordination and hand off from each team is done to meet miles.
- Plan and review projects to ensure no surprises or last minute gotcha’s.
- Overall responsible for efficiency of business life cycle events project management and deployment.
Responsibilities for Capacity:
- Review all support systems for further optimization.
- Provides focus on reuse, reusability and more efficient with resources.
- Work with internal teams on system changes and refresh projects.
- Work with internal teams on implication of new technology as it relates to capacity.
- Perform simulations for management, trading team, and infrastructure team member on capacity case studies.
- Present and communicate configuration proposals that will change capacity usage to peers.
- Creating, maintaining and/or verifying scalability formulas for system components.
- Communicate advantages and disadvantages of internally proposed solutions and make recommendations for all asset classes as to how they impact resources, both servers and session ports.
- Work closely with market data team on message usage.
- Work closely with market data team to assess capacity changes implications.
- Enforce capacity requirements that new code have appropriate testing and support documentation.