A propos de Talan
Talan UK is the english subsidiary of Talan, a French consulting firm with more than 4000 employees worldwide, and locations in eight countries (four continents). In 2021 and for the 7th consecutive year, Talan has been recognized with the “Great Place to Work” award.
Talan UK offers employees a dynamic work environment, growth opportunities and a competitive compensation package.
Our success is measured by both our employee and client satisfaction, which is our priority.
Department Overview
The APS ES deliver services to all of the bank’s traders (FX, Rates, Equities & Derivatives, eCommerce and Credit businesses) across its main hubs (London, New York, Singapore and Paris) and local sites.
The FX Trading Support team is in charge of providing traders and sales with functional help on their applications, especially around pricing calculation, position management, exchange order handling, algo trading, electronic booking and internal order management issues.
The production support team is also in charge of releasing new packages in production to traders and sales, as driven by the global FX business, while maximising uptime for its end users.
The FX business has over 100 traders in 4 centres, with its trading headquartered in London. Its management is committed to raising its level to a position within the top 5 of FX banks through investment in the business and technology.
The FX eTrading Support team handles connections to a variety of FX markets (Reuters, EBS, FXall, Currenex, 360T …), direct clients and vendor platforms and is in direct contact with those business or technology providers’ partners.
The team core activity is to provide high quality analysis of business and technical issues to traders, and as such requires good IT and analytical skills, fluent English, alongside a strong learning capacity fully support the complex architecture of our trading systems.
Most of the solutions are internal development, and as such the interaction with developers is a key factor, meaning that the team needs to have sufficient IT knowledge to interact with their counterparts in an efficient manner.
Support teams are organized globally on a follow-the-sun model, the FX market being open from Sunday evening to Friday evening.
In London, rotas are in place to cover from 7am to 7pm on weekday. The team also perform functional checks on Saturday post-releases, again on a rota basis.
The vast majority of the team clients are traders based in London, but the team act as level 2 or 3 for other locations, mainly in New, Singapore, and Europe.
Day-to-day Responsibilities:
Application Monitoring and follow up:
- Responsible for global uptime target of 99.9%, across the whole FX platform
- Coverage of below FX applications production implementation, troubleshooting and monitoring:
- Market access (connectivity, protocol definition issues, latency analysis)
- Algorithmic hedging (strategies, orders configuration, OR setup)
- Algorithmic (GTD, GTC) and OBO trading (stop, limit, call, fixings, linked orders)
- Pricing (Spot/Outright)
- Market making gateways (spot/outright/STP trading)
- Market taking platforms (liquidity sourcing)
- Position management and integration
- Booking flow and related coherence cache
- Client orders management platform
Incident and Problem Management:
- Investigate incident root cause and provide workaround to traders on variety of issues, ranging from mispricing, misbooking, incorrect position, etc…
- Manage/Own P1/P2 incidents and problems end to end
- 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, slowness etc..) and ownership of their resolution
- Diagnoses issues: establishes their root case.
- Initiates task force over critical incidents
- Liaises with upstream and downstream systems support teams as appropriate
- Monitors application state and input/output data correctness throughout the day, hand-over with follow the sun support teams
- Performs system administration
- Updates the relevant Production KPIs
- Monitoring using in house tools and Python scripts
Knowledge Management and Documentation:
- 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:
- Participates to release cycles for functional validation on staging/preproduction and production environments – in particular for logs
- Review release and coordinate around deployment/post release checks
- Communicates Release Notes
Project and specific tasks:
- 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 can also include management application impact of database or MQ systems migration.
- Team is also responsible, from an IT perspective, for specific client onboarding on 3rd platform (Traiana Netlink), including go-live certification.
Required skills:
- Strong analytic and problem-solving skills.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
- Motivated to work under own initiative whilst being a team player.
- Strong knowledge of the FX business products and Electronic Markets.
- Strong knowledge of SQL (SQL Server and Oracle).
- Strong knowledge of Excel/VBA.
- Strong knowledge of Unix/Linux systems
- Knowledge of Networks, Market Data, and messaging technologies (FIX, TCP/IP, TIBRV, MQ Series, Multicast).
Desired skills:
- Knowledge of scripting languages
- Knowledge of C++/C# beneficial.
Education and Experience
- Bachelor or Master's degree in a numerate subject (Engineering, Computer Science, Math, Physics, etc…) required and skills in Finance