Application Support Analyst (Front Office)

The Application Support team provides comprehensive support for all applications to the trading business ensuring best practice is applied to system support, upgrades, testing and procedures. The team has a broad range of technical skill sets and is dynamic yet highly disciplined in its approach. As the primary interface between the business and the various IT departments, an understanding of the business context in which the trading applications are deployed is of paramount importance.

Position purpose: To provide support of both in-house and vendor supplied applications in the Front Office. The role will support traders and analysts while working closely with our core functions area.

Main responsibilities:

• Diagnose and resolve day-to-day live system incidents across a range of systems including both internally developed and vendor supplied applications.
• Provide stakeholder management to senior business and IT stakeholders.
• Take ownership of Major Incident management and associated Problem Management process.
• Effectively record and monitor progress of all incidents and service requests raised into the central ITSM tools, providing timely feedback to the business and stakeholders as required.
• Collaborate with relevant teams to plan, test and implement on-going enhancements to systems.
• Operate within a change-controlled environment through the creation of thorough deployment plans and presentation of business and technical changes to the change board.
• Liaise with other support/development teams to resolve cross-system issues.
• Monitor the availability, performance and throughput of supported applications.
• Share knowledge and expertise with others, coaching and supporting team members as required.

Experience required:

• Evident systems analysis skills ideally garnered within an energy, commodity or similar trading environment.
• Experience on a support desk responsible for front office production applications.
• Understanding of the trade lifecycle (ideally coupled with knowledge of the downstream technical and business processes).
• Able to manage incidents and service requests while providing timely status updates to users.
• Experience of a trading-based service delivery environment.
• Communication with the business and third-party vendors tracking delivery of vendor support and solutions and ensuring they meet SLAs.
• Experience in trading and risk management systems for commodities covering front to back-office is highly desirable.

Technical requirements:

• Experience in diagnosing application problems in a Windows Server and Azure Kubernetes environment.
• Must evidence skills in SQL Server (2016 upwards) and/or Oracle (11G on).
• Knowledge of a scripting language (e.g. PowerShell) and/or proficiency with Excel/VBA would also be advantageous.
• Knowledge of ITIL is preferred.
• Experience in Azure App Insights is desirable.

Person specification:

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with an ability to communicate effectively and professionally.
• Structured, systematic and analytical in approach with a problem-solving mentality.
• Customer focused, and goal orientated with keen attention to detail.
• Adept at working with challenging users in a fast-paced trading floor environment.
• Have a broad understanding of the business context of the systems in use.
• Willingness to learn new technologies and maintain industry knowledge.
• Able to communicate technical information in a clear and understandable manner to non-technical stakeholders.
• Good understanding and appreciation of change control processes.
• Pro-active approach to monitoring and automation.
• Open to new ideas and change initiatives, with an ability to modify the current approach in the face of new demands.
• Proven ability in effective time management.
• Able to work flexible hours as requested.
• Proactive and positive approach to work.

Hours of work: 40 hours per week with variable start (07:00 - 09:00) plus additional paid out of hours support rota duties.