Application Production Support

Candidate Profile:

Highly motivated with an ability to learn & master large and complex software systems

First class degree of top university

Mathematical or/and IT background is preferred.

Candidates must have relevant experience in a similar role, the majority of which should have been gained within APS or OPS. They must be experienced in providing support as part of a team, and have practical understanding of the criticality of ALMT applications.

The role focuses on a wide range of financial products and technologies. Hence candidates with additional finance background will be desirable.

Mandatory requirements, Good working knowledge of :

o ALMT

o SQL Skills

o Python scripting

Role-Specific Skills:

Knowledge of ALMT environments

Good knowledge on financial services with a focus on Front Office and OPS

Good functional knowledge on financial products

Good knowledge on Linux (Navigation the system s directories, manipulating files, permission, Linux commands for process management)

Good Databases skills - SQL queries writing and analysis

Good scripting skills (eg. Perl, Shell, Python)

Practical understanding of production processes, including change and release management

Good incident and problem management skills, with knowledge of ITIL will be beneficial

Language Required: English

Personal Attributes:

Strong problem-solving skills

Good interpersonal skills and team player

Client-focused, attention to details, ownership and accountability, proactive, desire to learn

Available for work during week end and bank holidays (with appropriate notice) and out of hours in case of production incidents

High quality analysis with communication skills, ability to clearly explain technical issues

Ability to work under pressure in a changing environment

Ability to read Java

Very good level of SQL (Oracle Sybase)

Knowledge of a scheduler (Autosys)

Good level of Unix scripting

Ability to read logs

Day to day activities :

Incident and Problem Management:

Provide 1st and 2nd level support for internal clients and 2nd level support for external client.

Manage/Own P1/P2 incidents and problems end to end

Provide workaround in order to reduce the Business impact/outage of a critical or major incident

Diagnoses issues: establishes their root cause.

Communicates with internal users and management over incidents and post-mortems

Ensures all support issues are correctly logged in the Bank incident management system with relevant details (downtime, business impact, location etc..) and own them to resolution

Initiates task force over critical incidents

Liaises with upstream and downstream systems support teams when needed

Application Monitoring and follow up:

Responsible for global uptime target of 99.9%, across the platform

Monitors application state and input/output data correctness throughout the day, hand-over with follow the sun support teams

Put in place monitoring to provide proactive support

Performs system administration

Updates the relevant Production KPIs

Knowledge Management and Documentation:

Follow the document and support process strategy of APS ALMT SRS

Documents support procedures on wiki

Owns team knowledge base on wiki for all in-scope applications

Provides support to end-users on how to use the application

Ensures Follow-the-Sun and regional support teams are trained as required, in particular over new releases

Communicates a daily handover document to Follow-The-Sun support teams, where appropriate

Continuous Service Level improvement:

Contributes to capacity management of in-scope applications: proactively tracks trends in application behaviour, and alerts Application Production and Development teams of any potential risks in the future

Ensures that all application support logs are fit for purpose, ie meaningful and actionable.

Actively seeks reduction of dependency on manual interventions by support staff, e.g leveraging enterprise batch scheduling and enterprise monitoring tools

Maintenance and enhancements:

Performs functional pre-release checks

Participates to release cycles for functional validation on staging/preproduction and production environments

Coordinates functional post release checks

Communicates globally to support teams the new functionalities and organize training when required

Communicates Release Notes to Business

Participates to DRP/BCP exercises

Project and specific tasks:

Liaises with the IT development teams to ensure enhancements and bug fixes are prioritized, and completed as appropriate

Various project and smaller tasks are managed by the team, all related to support: most of the tasks are incident response, business request or maintenance

Project are mainly related to new development where application support role is to make sure of the supportability, monitoring of the new tool, team and user training, project fits the APS standards