Production Operations Specialist (Regional Technical Team Lead) recruitment

About 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 Services Group

The Production Services Group is dedicated to maintaining the reliability and stability of all client facing trading environments. This new team is currently functional in New York and London, covering the Americas and EMEA regions. In time the team will be expanded to include Hong Kong (covering APAC) and provide 24x7 coverage, utilizing a follow the sun support model. The successful candidate will provide regional technical leadership of a small team of analysts and will report to the global team manager. 

The group offers an exciting and challenging position to top performers, with exposure to a broad spectrum of technology in a dynamic, geographically distributed, real time trading environment.

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 of the team:

• Ownership, maintenance and support of all trading system components (including order managers, FIX/API connectivity, market data distribution, exchange links, messaging middleware etc.).

• Identification and mitigation of risks to service delivery and proactive resolution of issues before they impact service levels.

• Incident and Problem Management, including Root Cause Analysis and follow up. Coordination of all relevant parties during client facing outages. Timely escalation of complex issues or problems.

• Resiliency Testing.  Regular and systematic testing of application redundancy and failover.

• Real-time System Monitoring using a diverse number of industry standard and proprietary tools.

• Capacity Planning and Assessment.

• System Maintenance, including change and release management (planned and emergency application deployment, configuration and patching).

• Definition, management, and leadership of projects to improve operational efficiency, system monitoring and automation of manual tasks.

• Definition and maintenance of operational run books and other documentation.

Required Experience:

• 4+ years experience supporting real time trading systems (or equivalent mission critical systems)

• Previous Technical Team Leadership experience.

• Experience supporting multi-tiered JAVA applications in UNIX/Linux distributed server environments.

• Solid understanding of TCP/IP and experience performing basic network troubleshooting.

• Excellent troubleshooting and problem solving skills across a wide variety of technologies and disciplines.

• Proven ability to perform incident management, prioritize, and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment.

• An excellent team player able to both handover and assume responsibility for tasks that require follow up activity across time zones.

• A strong desire to proactively 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).

• Ability to question existing practices and procedures and take nothing for granted in order to improve system availability and our customer experience.

• Strong scripting skills (i.e. PERL, Ruby, etc.) – Ruby preferred.

• Operational knowledge of Messaging middleware (JMS), distribute caching software (Gemfire), and databases (MySQL and Sybase).

Additional 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).

• Ability to define and follow standard operating procedures.

• Experience with industry standard monitoring tools (like Opsview, Nagios etc.).

• 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 and problem management.

• Financial sector and E-commerce experience, especially if gained from another trading platform.

• Junior level UNIX administration skills (Solaris/Linux).

• 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.

To apply, send your resume and cover letter by applying below with “Production Ops” noted in the subject line.