Front Office Trading Application Support Analyst

Description

The company is an international consulting and technology group with work in financial services, data and AI, cloud, digital transformation and software engineering. It works with major financial institutions on resilient, high-performance technology for front-office trading and business-critical operations.

The team supports a global Rates eTrading platform used by traders and sales staff in several international markets. The role suits someone with a solid background in front-office production support who works well in a quick-moving trading setting and likes tackling technical and business problems.

Responsibilities

• You will keep a complex Rates eTrading technology estate stable, monitored and improving over time, and make sure the mission-critical front-office trading applications stay reliable and perform well.
• You will act as the main link between Trading, Sales, Development, Infrastructure and Support, working directly with front-office users and stakeholders.
• You will own Priority 1 and Priority 2 incidents from the first alert to resolution, carry out root cause analysis and lead post-incident reviews.
• During major incidents you will keep traders, sales teams, technology teams and management informed, and coordinate task-force work on critical production issues.
• You will work closely with upstream and downstream support teams to resolve issues quickly, and make sure every incident is logged, tracked and documented accurately.
• You will push forward improvements to platform stability and support processes.
• You will support and monitor a group of Rates eTrading applications in a global production environment, keeping availability and operational performance high.
• Through the trading day you will watch application health, market data and trade flows, and system alerts, and carry out proactive troubleshooting and performance analysis.
• You will run production support tasks, system administration work and operational readiness checks, and take part in global handovers with follow-the-sun support teams.
• You will build automation and monitoring improvements to make operations more efficient, and contribute to monitoring migrations and tooling work using Python and related technologies.
• You will write and maintain support documentation, operating procedures and knowledge articles, and serve as the subject matter expert for the supported applications.
• You will help with user training and adoption of new functionality, and help onboard and train regional and follow-the-sun support teams.
• You will keep operational handover procedures clear and effective.
• You will spot trends, risks and capacity concerns across the supported platforms, and improve monitoring, alerting and observability.
• You will cut manual operational work through automation and process changes, and make sure support tooling and application logs stay useful and fit for purpose.
• You will help lead operational excellence initiatives across the support function.
• You will take part in release cycles and production deployments, carry out pre-release validation and post-release checks, and coordinate deployment work with development and infrastructure teams.
• You will review release notes, share them with stakeholders, and make sure new functionality is supportable and ready to run before it goes live.
• You will contribute to technology projects and strategic initiatives that affect trading systems, and support the introduction of new applications, enhancements and platform upgrades.
• You will define operational requirements, monitoring standards and support models for new solutions, and make sure projects include suitable monitoring, documentation, training and support processes.

Requirements

• Essential: proven experience in front-office trading application support within investment banking or capital markets.
• Essential: most of your experience should come from supporting front-office trading desks and business-critical trading applications.
• Essential: a clear understanding of the criticality, availability and responsiveness that electronic trading platforms need.
• Essential: experience supporting applications as part of a global support team in a fast-paced trading environment.
• Essential: proven experience handling high-severity production incidents through to resolution.
• Essential: strong troubleshooting, analytical and root cause analysis skills.
• Essential: experience working directly with traders, sales teams, development teams and senior business stakeholders.
• Essential: strong commercial awareness and an understanding of how technology affects front-office business performance.
• Essential: excellent communication, relationship-building and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to bridge technical and business teams.
• Essential: confidence dealing with both junior and senior stakeholders across business and technology functions.
• Essential: experience supporting complex, varied technology environments and interconnected systems.
• Essential: a strong grasp of Linux and Unix environments.
• Essential: good SQL and database troubleshooting skills.
• Essential: scripting and automation experience with Python, Shell or similar technologies.
• Essential: experience with enterprise monitoring, observability and support tooling.
• Essential: a results-driven approach with a strong sense of ownership and accountability.
• Highly desirable: knowledge of rates trading products such as fixed income, bonds, swaps, repos or related markets.
• Highly desirable: experience supporting electronic trading, pricing, execution, market data or risk platforms.
• Highly desirable: experience within a global follow-the-sun support model.
• Highly desirable: exposure to release management, DevOps practices and production change processes.
• Highly desirable: familiarity with vendor and in-house trading platforms.
• Education: a degree in computer science, mathematics, engineering, physics, finance or a related technical subject. Equivalent industry experience will also be considered.

Conditions

This is a permanent position.

The role includes shift work and a weekend support rota.

You must have the right to work in the UK. Sponsorship is not available for this role.

You must be based in London or within a reasonable commuting distance, and must already live in or around London.

The role is London-based and requires attendance on site 5 days per week.