Production Operations recruitment
TradingScreen
TradingScreen is a financial services company (est. 1999) specializing in independent, multi-broker, multi-asset class Execution Management Systems (EMS) offering Direct Market Access (DMA), discretionary, algorithmic, and Notice of Execution (NOE) order routing to the leading sell side firms, including all prime brokers and investment banks.
TradingScreen provides a flexible range of execution management interfaces to suit the client’s specific trading style/strategy, including TS TradeSmart™ (Java based User Interface), TS TradeExcel™ (automated Microsoft Excel front end), TS TradeFIX™ (Financial Information eXchange (“FIX”) connectivity hub) and TS TradeLink™ (automated flat file polling mechanism). Straight through processing (“STP”) is achieved through integration with many of the leading Order and Portfolio Management System providers.
TradingScreen is privately owned and currently employs approximately 200 staff spread across 10 offices (including London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong), ensuring a strong local presence as well as a global reach. Each region covers the key functions of the company: Development, Support, Sales, Infrastructure, and Administration. Collectively, the team has an unmatched record in the electronic trading and connectivity fields, and has been at the forefront of the industry evolution for many years.
Production Operations
The Production group is dedicated to maintaining the reliability of the production trading environment.
• Incident Response and Root Cause Analysis
• On-going Resiliency Testing
• Real-time System Monitoring
• Capacity Assessment and Planning
• System Maintenance
The Production group offers exciting and challenging positions to top performers, with exposure to a broad spectrum of technology.
Successful candidates will contribute individual specialties to a team effort to achieve new levels of operational excellence and ensure that TradingScreen is “always on”. Success in the role will require developing a deep understanding of the entire global trading system and working closely with specialized development and infrastructure teams. Most importantly, successful candidates will be proactive, question assumptions, and not accept anything less than perfection.
Key Responsibilities Include:
• Root Cause Analysis and follow through for service disruptions and risk conditions
• Regular and systematic testing of application redundancy and failover
• Real-time monitoring of the trading environments
• Proactively identify, track, and coordinate issues before they impact service levels
• Maintenance and support of all trading systems (including order managers, FIX connectivity, market data, direct exchange links, etc.)
• Application deployment, configuration, patching, and debugging
• Work with specialized development and infrastructure teams to resolve technical issues
• Follow established processes and procedures for both development and maintenance work
• Undertake projects to improve operational efficiency
• Define and maintain operational run books
Qualifications and Experience
• 2 years+ experience supporting trading systems (or equivalent mission critical systems)
• Experience supporting JAVA applications in server environments
• Strong experience and a good working knowledge of real-time trading systems
• Working experience with UNIX/Linux based distributed systems
• Ability to define and follow standard operating procedures
• Solid understanding of TCP/IP and experience performing basic network troubleshooting
• Experience with industry standard monitoring tools (like Opsview, Nagios, etc.)
• Excellent troubleshooting and problem solving skills across a wide variety of technologies and disciplines
• Proven ability to prioritize and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment
• An excellent team player able to both pass on and assume responsibility for tasks that require follow up activity across time zones
• Have a strong desire to anticipate and prevent potential problems
• Demonstrable capacity to enlist and coordinate the efforts of diverse groups to achieve quick and efficient results (oriented to action)
• Have the urge to question everything and take nothing for granted.
Additional Qualifications and Experience
• Demonstrable ability to understand and analyze complicated interactions and data flows in a complex, geographically distributed system (including interactions between layers of the stack)
• Demonstrable ability to correlate events based on log file analysis (from multiple applications, servers, and network devices)
• Ability to write a formal incident report based on a detailed investigation of an IT incident
• Experience performing root cause analysis
• Experience within the financial sector, especially with other trading systems
• Scripting skills (i.e. PERL, Ruby, etc.)
• Knowledge of the FIX protocol
• Working knowledge of JMS, distribute caching software, or databases
• Junior UNIX administration skills (Solaris/Linux)
• Experience supporting multi-tier application environments
• Excellent documentation skills (including use of tools like wiki, Visio, etc.)
• Strong oral and written communication skills with a demonstrable ability to interact and influence at all levels of the business up to and including the CEO