Job Purposes:
- We are seeking an experienced and service-oriented Head, of Section to manage our offshore application support team and serve as the primary liaison between business users in Singapore, technology teams, and external vendors. This is a critical leadership role responsible for ensuring the stability, availability, performance, and continuous improvement of our front-to-back trading application landscape.
- The successful candidate will lead a team supporting mission-critical applications across the trading ecosystem, ensuring systems operate reliably on a 24x5.5 support model, meeting business expectations, regulatory obligations, and service level commitments. The role requires strong stakeholder management skills, operational excellence, and the ability to coordinate incident resolution, problem management, platform monitoring, vendor engagement, and service improvement initiatives.
- Working closely with business users, infrastructure teams, cybersecurity teams, vendors, and regional technology partners, the Application Services Lead will drive operational stability, improve support processes, and ensure a high level of service delivery across all supported platforms.
Job Responsibilities:
Team Leadership & Service Management
- Lead and manage the offshore application support team, ensuring effective delivery of production support services.
- Provide leadership, coaching, mentoring, and performance management for application support engineers.
- Establish clear support procedures, escalation paths, operational standards, and service expectations.
- Manage resource planning, support coverage, and roster arrangements to meet the 24x5.5 operating model.
- Foster a customer-focused culture emphasizing responsiveness, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Application Operations & Availability
- Ensure high availability, stability, and performance of all supported business and trading applications.
- Monitor application health, proactively identify potential issues, and coordinate preventative actions to minimize service disruptions.
- Manage incidents, service requests, problem management activities, and root cause analysis processes. • Drive timely resolution of production issues while ensuring effective stakeholder communication during incidents. • Ensure critical batch processes, interfaces, market data feeds, and trading-related services operate successfully and within defined service windows.
Business & User Engagement
- Act as the primary technology contact for business users based in Singapore.
- Build strong relationships with key stakeholders to understand business priorities and support requirements.
- Coordinate application support activities across business, technology, infrastructure, and vendor teams.
- Communicate service status, major incidents, risks, and improvement initiatives to management and stakeholders.
- Drive user satisfaction through responsive support and effective issue management.
Vendor & Third-Party Management
- Manage relationships with application vendors, service providers, and support partners.
- Ensure vendor service levels are met and support obligations are fulfilled.
- Coordinate vendor-led troubleshooting, upgrades, patches, and issue resolution activities.
- Monitor vendor performance and identify opportunities to improve service quality and responsiveness.
Operational Excellence & Continuous Improvement
- Implement and enhance monitoring, alerting, logging, and operational dashboards to improve service visibility.
- Drive automation of repetitive operational tasks to improve efficiency and reduce operational risk.
- Analyze incident trends, recurring issues, and service metrics to identify improvement opportunities.
- Establish and maintain operational documentation, knowledge repositories, and support runbooks.
- Lead service improvement initiatives focused on system reliability, operational resilience, and support effectiveness.
Governance, Risk & Compliance
- Ensure supported applications comply with internal policies, regulatory requirements, and technology standards.
- Support internal and external audits and address audit findings in a timely manner.
- Participate in disaster recovery planning, resilience testing, and business continuity exercises.
- Ensure operational risks are identified, assessed, documented, and appropriately mitigated.
- Maintain strong controls around production support, change management, and release management processes.
Change & Release Management
- Oversee production releases, application upgrades, and maintenance activities.
- Ensure changes are properly tested, reviewed, approved, and implemented with minimal business disruption.
- Coordinate post-release monitoring and issue management to ensure successful deployment outcomes.
- Collaborate with infrastructure, cybersecurity, database, and network teams to support change activities.
Job Requirements:
Essential
- Minimum 10 years of experience supporting and managing mission-critical applications within the financial services, capital markets, brokerage, or banking industry.
- Minimum 5 years of leadership experience managing application support teams.
- Proven track record of supporting business-critical applications in a high availability environment.
- Strong experience leading production support operations, incident management, problem management, and service delivery functions.
- Experience managing offshore support teams and coordinating support services across multiple locations.
- Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to interact effectively with business users, senior management, vendors, and technology teams.
- Experience managing third-party vendors and service providers.
- Excellent troubleshooting, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to work effectively under pressure and manage multiple priorities in a dynamic environment.
- Experience with IT service management frameworks such as ITIL.
- Understanding of change management, release management, and operational governance processes.
Technical Knowledge
- Experience supporting enterprise applications running on Microsoft and/or Linux platforms.
- Good understanding of databases, SQL, application interfaces, APIs, and middleware technologies.
- Experience with application monitoring, observability, and log management tools.
- Familiarity with batch processing, job scheduling, and operational support tools.
- Experience with scripting and automation technologies to improve operational efficiency.
Preferred
- Experience supporting trading, brokerage, clearing, settlement, market data, wealth management, or capital markets applications.
- Exposure to cloud-based platforms and modern monitoring solutions.
- Familiarity with regulatory and operational requirements within financial institutions.
- Knowledge of MSSQL, Web Services, and API integrations.
- Interest in financial markets and trading systems.
