IT Application Production Support

Major Financial Institution seeks a service support specialist, to support and troubleshoot production applications. This role involves teamwork with Operations and Portfolio Managers and Application Development communities at all levels within the firm.  Excellent communication skills are a must for this position.  Familiarity with Fixed Income, financial instruments and portfolio management is highly desirable but not essential.  The individual should have a passion for system support role; have strong analytical and troubleshooting skills, able to work successfully in a cross-functional environment including development, networking, operating systems, database, application servers and web serving.  The successful candidate must have a proven ability to fully use and apply standard technical troubleshooting principles, system analysis and testing while following standardized Problem and Change Management policies and procedures. This person must have the ability to work on projects and other assignments with minimal direct supervision.  Excellent communication skills are a must for this position.


Responsibilities
*Provide user/technical support for applications which service Investment Management business function.
*Maintains operation, monitoring and integrity of production systems to meet established standards.
*Participate in the Incident Management and Problem Management processes as a resolver accountable for root cause analysis, resolution and reporting.
*Ensure that all production changes are processed according to Change Management policies and procedures.
*Ensure that appropriate levels of Quality Assurance have been met for all new and existing products.
*Ensure that products and changes are fully documented, supportable and captured in the Configuration Management Database.
*Interface with internal and external business and technical partners.
*Support of the UAT environment.
*Participate in regression testing and BC/DR exercises.
*Proactively identify opportunities for change within the production environment.
*Interact with middle office groups to determine data, performance, and other issues related to the application.
*Familiarity with financial instruments and portfolio management is desirable.  The candidate will be expected to gain new financial knowledge as needed

Skills/Qualifications
*Bachelor of Science degree or an equivalent combination of education and work experience
*One to three recent years of experience in computing, development, architecture and/or client/server n-tier application experience required.  The main responsibility is troubleshooting production issues, solving problems and implementation of production software.
*Solid knowledge of Visual Basic scripting, experience with Sybase and SQL is required.
*Knowledge of Unix and Oracle is a plus.
*Good organizational skills, vendor management skills, inclusive of issue tracking, metric reporting etc.
*Demonstrate experience in effective decision making within a high pressured environment.
*Ability to communicate at multiple levels across AD and the business.
*Strong research, investigation and evaluation skills.
*Ability to identify and clearly communicate problems/support requests in order to influence the prioritization of production defects and/or enhancements.
*Proven ability as a member of a team to communicate technical and production-related concepts to a broad range of technical and non-technical staff.
*Experience with disaster recovery planning, testing, auditing, risk analysis, business resumption planning and contingency planning.
*Excellent communication skills, both written and oral
*Excellent written and interpersonal communication skills.
*Proven ability as a member of a team to communicate technical and production-related concepts to a broad range of technical and non-technical staff.
*Results oriented and highly flexible individual, able to work with minimal supervision.