Application and Platform Engineer

Overall Purpose of Role

Provide Level 2 and Level 3 technical support with a focus on reliability, resilience, and automation for the LME’s Middle Office, Back Office, and Market Data mission‑critical applications. This role combines application support with modern SRE principles and platform engineering practices, helping ensure system stability, scalability, and continuous improvement for internal teams and external clients.

Shift Pattern: Standard 40 Hour Week (United Kingdom)

Scheduled Weekly Hours: 40

Corporate Grade: E - Associate

Reporting Line (UK Division): Information Technology

Location: UK‑London

Worker Type: Permanent

Core Responsibilities

• Support our application suite in production with a view of platform engineering activities, including maintaining containerised environments and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Build, migrate, support, optimise and manage our physical, virtual, containerised Openshift and Kubernetes environments for scalability, resilience, and operational efficiency, with a focus on a ‘Five nines’ operational availability.
• Deliver technical support for application rollouts within project frameworks.
• Assist project delivery across Waterfall and Agile methodologies, with exposure to Hybrid approaches.
• Troubleshoot and resolve incidents across applications, infrastructure, and network layers.
• Contribute to service improvements through automation and process optimisation.
• Participate in incident, change, and problem management processes.
• Validate changes through QA and automated testing pipelines.
• Apply RE practices such as proactive monitoring and performance tuning to improve system reliability.

Key Accountabilities

• Maintain and support mission‑critical applications across Trading, Data and Clearing business units.
• Assist with regulatory, infrastructure, and security projects.
• Monitor application performance using observability tools and implement tuning where needed.
• Support test and production environments to ensure stability and readiness.
• Contribute to automation initiatives and CI/CD pipeline improvements.
• Maintain accurate documentation for supported systems and platforms.
• Participate in disaster recovery exercises and operational resiliency testing.
• Help identify and remediate security vulnerabilities across systems.

Technical Responsibilities

• Maintain and test disaster recovery procedures.
• Respond promptly to production issues and communicate resolutions effectively.
• Support 24/7/365 system availability, including flexible shifts and on‑call rota.
• Work with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Bamboo, BitBucket) to support deployments.
• Assist with Infrastructure as Code using Ansible Tower.
• Support containerised environments on OpenShift and Kubernetes, ensuring scalability and resilience.
• Implement and maintain observability stacks with Grafana/Prometheus and Splunk for metrics and log analysis.
• Automate repetitive tasks using scripting languages (Python, Bash, PowerShell).

Working with others

• Collaborate with internal production teams, project teams, and business stakeholders.
• Work closely with Risk, Security, and GRC teams, as well as external vendors and auditors.
• Strong problem‑solving skills, innovative mindset, and technical curiosity.
• Clear communicator and team player with a focus on collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Organised and proactive with excellent documentation skills.
• Ownership mindset: accountable for end‑to‑end delivery and lifecycle thinking.

PERSON SPECIFICATION

Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science or a related discipline or 2+ years of equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Experience

• Strong SQL and database knowledge (MySQL, Oracle, Liquibase).
• Hands‑on experience with CI/CD, IaC, containerisation, and orchestration tools.
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability platforms.
• Exposure to DevSecOps practices and vulnerability scanning.
• 2–4 years in financial markets or mission‑critical environments.
• Good understanding of networking, infrastructure, and cloud technologies.
• Experience supporting .NET, Java, and microservices‑based applications.

Desirable

• ITIL Foundation Certification v3/v4.
• ServiceNow experience.
• SRE and Agile/Lean methodologies.
• Swift Payment systems knowledge.

Skills

• Strong problem‑solving skills and technical curiosity.
• Clear communicator and collaborative team player.
• Organised and proactive with good documentation skills.
• Passion for automation and continuous improvement.
• Comfortable working in Agile environments and using shared tools (Jira, Confluence).
• Ability to work under pressure and prioritise effectively.

Personal Qualities

• Delivers high‑quality results under pressure and tight deadlines.
• Strong problem‑solving skills with an innovative, curious mindset.
• Clear communicator and collaborative team player, promoting knowledge sharing.
• Organised, proactive, and detail‑oriented with strong planning skills.
• Ownership mindset with a passion for automation and continuous improvement.
• Comfortable with Agile practices and CI/CD tools (Jira, Confluence).
• Supports a culture of learning through blameless post‑mortems and experimentation.

The LME is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. In recruiting for our teams, we welcome the unique contributions that you can bring in terms of education, ethnicity, race, sex, gender identity and expression, nation of origin, age, languages spoken, colour, religion, disability, sexual orientation and beliefs. In doing so, we want every LME employee to feel our commitment to showing respect for all and encouraging open collaboration and communication.