L2 Application Support

Role Summary:

The role is in the existing team that provides L2 application support during market hours. The key responsibility is to ensure the stability of the production environment, working closely with the L1 customer-facing team, FIX Onboarding team, Developers & Infrastructure engineers. The L2 team investigates & tries to resolve any production incident, from small issues or questions up to large system outages, reaching out to other teams and escalating if necessary. Change management, tracking open issues in Jira & Service Now, updating support procedures in Confluence, and root cause analysis are other important parts of the role.

Main Responsibilities / Accountabilities: (Specific day-to-day responsibilities and milestones needed to achieve the objectives)

Anticipate, diagnose and resolve issues with the NEST trading platform

Interface daily with internal coverage & global support teams in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment. There is considerable exposure to external trading clients too, and a key requirement is the ability to build strong user relationships

Proactively manage and monitor our environment, together with extensive problem identification, ownership, tracking, resolution and escalation

Manage system outages, direct activities of development and infrastructure teams to resolve production issues

Drive initiatives that continue to improve the availability, stability, and performance of the system

Closely cooperate and collaborate with development, test engineering, product, and client coverage teams

Work with developers on supportability designs, application optimization and performance tunings

Monitor the production application environment for problems and diagnose root causes

Work with engineering teams to maintain a scalable, reliable, and robust environment

Drive the improvement cycle from Operations back into development and vice versa

Provide follow-the-sun model support with regional teams and rotational on-call escalation

Key Relationships: (Those key individuals they will work with internally and externally)

Internal

L1 customer support team members

Sales & Account Management team

Tech Infrastructure including Unix/Windows systems & Networking

Clients Onboarding team

QA team

Talking with clients/traders or brokers if L1 need to bring somebody more technical onto a troubleshooting call or webex

Essential Skills/Experience Required: (must have skills & experience)

A logical and methodical approach to problem-solving

Flexible thinking outside the box for root causes and side-effects

Experience with real-time production trading architectures, with significant uptime and reliability expectations

Have a detailed knowledge of Linux systems (eg RHEL, CentOS) with regular use of unix command line

Familiarity with Databases, proficient in SQL and query tools

Have a basic working knowledge of FIX Protocol

Experience with end-to-end application support and troubleshooting

Good written and verbal communication skills

Desired Skills/Experience Required: (nice to have skills & experience)

Familiarity with the concepts of daily change control / release cycle

Updating/creating Unix scripts in ksh/bash. Also Perl, Python nice to have

Experience with process schedulers (eg cron, FTP job schedulers)

Ability to navigate through complex infrastructures independently, using a range of tools provided to investigate an issue

Keenness to own side projects including building or improving support tools

Experience with DevOps and concepts (eg Chef, Puppet, Github, Jenkins)

Experience with monitoring, and alerting tools (eg ITRS, Nagios)

Basic knowledge of network routing concepts

Application Containerization (eg Docker, Kubernetes)

Education/ Certifications:

Degree level education in Computer Science preferred.

Other mathematically / logically-oriented subjects can be considered