Production Lead

This is an exciting opportunity to join a team at the forefront of transformation. As the Manila Production Lead, this role will play a pivotal role in reshaping how Production aligns with our client's business lines – driving service excellence and operational agility. This is a unique opportunity to lead structural change within their Manila office, setting the tone for high-performing teams and becoming the local escalation point for critical production issues.

The ideal candidate has proven experience leading Level 2 support teams, combining strong technical expertise as well as leadership qualities that will help set the tone and culture of the team in Manila. This is a hands-on role, and familiarity with supporting distributed applications across both cloud and on-prem environments will be key to quickly becoming a trusted escalation point for both local and global teams.

Exceptional communication and collaboration skills are essential, enabling you to build effective partnerships with global colleagues and foster solid relationships within the business. A passion for automation is highly desirable, particularly if you have a track record of using it to drive efficiency and optimise team performance.

Given the dynamic nature of the environment, flexibility around working hours is important, and some weekend work will be required.

Functional Role Responsibilities

• Manage and lead Manila-based resources within the global Production function
• Cater to installation requests coming from QA and Development groups that range from bug fixes, upgrades and enhancements of trading applications in accordance to established and documented baselines, policies and procedures.
• Manage both Incident and Problem Management activities as well as Change
• Monitor and administer all trading application functionality and the performance of system environment.
• Act as escalation point from first line support that troubleshoot problems by responding to daily broker/trader application trouble call requests. Provide higher-level deep dive analysis to that of first line counterparts.
• Manage the Application stack across non-production and production environments, working closely with the equivalent support teams within the EMEA and US regions. 
• Write scripts using Shell, Perl, Powershell, Python or SQL to automate installation, monitoring and data capture to check the health of the system.
• Create good quality documentation that describes application setup and procedure on how to accomplish a task (runbooks for installation procedures, remedies to known application issues and troubleshooting steps).
• Actively engage and contribute to meetings and conference calls that discuss production issues, scheduled production change or upcoming projects.
• Submit change control requests to document change in both non-production and production environments, proactively following-up status until completed.
• Lead major projects and Incident calls that the team are involved in, fostering a culture of collaboration and continual improvement.
• Ensure teams workloads are managed in-line with, and appropriate to, global team standards, policies and SLA's.

Management Role Responsibilities

• Lead and ensure that the teams achieve the behavioural objectives set by management.
• Monitor and track the team's key performance indicators.
• Propose new operational plans, including targeted budgets, work allocations and staff forecasts
• Responsible for driving the team to collaborate effectively with other teams and / or stakeholders  for more efficient business operations.
• Developing learning roadmaps to support the professional development of the team essential to their core skills set.
• Oversee and work with functional heads on recruitment and developing internal mobility opportunities for the team.

Experience / Competences

Essential 

• Windows Server operating systems
• Unix / Linux – Preferably power user level
• SQL (T-SQL, SQL Server Management Services)
• Working knowledge of networking tools (e.g. ssh, sftp, traceroute)
• Shell Scripting (PowerShell, Bash, Perl)
• Strong grasp of change management process
• Demonstrate strong experience in Monitoring / Observability tooling
• Strong grasp of ITIL based support process. Incident escalation etc Proven Team Management track record of 5 years plus in such a role

Desirable 

• Automation tools (Ansible, TFS, Jenkins)
• Knowledge of HTML, Javascript and CSS preferred
• Some experience with SQL language and Databases a major plus