IT Vacancy of the week: Equities Application Support Analyst Morgan Stanley | Canary Wharf

Company Profile
Morgan Stanley is a leading global financial services firm providing a wide range of investment banking, securities, investment management and wealth management services. The Firm’s employees serve clients worldwide including corporations, governments and individuals from more than 1,200 offices in 43 countries.

As a market leader, the talent and passion of our people is critical to our success. Together, we share a common set of values rooted in integrity, excellence and strong team ethic. Morgan Stanley can provide a superior foundation for building a professional career – a place for people to learn, to achieve and grow. A philosophy that balances personal lifestyles, perspectives and needs is an important part of our culture.

Department Profile
QAPM is a newly formed division that provides Quality Assurance and Production Management services to all clients within the Firm. QAPM partners with the development teams to ensure seamless technology delivery to our clients: ISGT, CPT, MSIM, MSWM Tech, ED&S, and TIR. QAPM’s goal is to deliver a first-class technology platform by ensuring top-notch service within QA and Production Management. This division will support the evolution of technology platforms and tools, manage and maintain our production plant, and ensure the implementation and adherence to proper operational controls to manage risk.

Team Profile
Member of the Application Support Group (ASG) Derivatives team supporting critical risk management, over-the-counter (OTC) lifecycle and market making applications used by the Equity Division. ASG runs shifts covering from 06:30-18:00. The team is responsible for ensuring the stability of these business critical client and server-based application processes and their associated infrastructure. To assist the users of applications by acting as a first point of contact for both application and data queries.

Primary Responsibilities
Candidates would be expected to perform the following roles:

• Proactive & reactive ready-for-business checks
• Proactive & reactive real-time monitoring of processes, connections & trade flows
• Notifying the business unit of system issues or failures in a timely manner.
• Notify Compliance in a timely manner of regulatory issues.
• Liaise with external parties to resolve issues.
• System break/fix and user recovery
• Investigating and resolving data quality issues
• Investigation of user queries. E.g. flow breaks, booking issues, data issues. Liaison with operations and controllers where appropriate.
• Escalating problems to level 3 (core development and engineering) groups.
• Act as an escalation point for frontline.
• War gaming failure scenarios identify problems with outage recovery procedures. Work with necessary parties to ensure that these are resolved.
• Assisting the users with end-user computing issues.

Candidates would also be expected to:

• Work closely with application programming group to ensure the support team has excellent knowledge of the application set
• Document recover procedures
• Client requirements and feedback are incorporated into the applications
• Operational enhancements are provided
• Work closely with application programming group and engineering to either develop, or provide specifications for tools to: Improve monitoring, increase the stability of the plant and Automate manual tasks
• Work closely with regional counterparts in New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo to:
  – Standardise monitoring procedures
  – Provide ‘follow the sun’ support

Skills Required (essential)

• Good working knowledge of FIX.
• Strong technical, communication, analytical and problem solving skills.
• In depth understanding of Equity Cash and derivative trading concepts and ability to interact with traders
• Good understanding of operating systems (UNIX, PC)
• Good understanding of SQL and Sybase databases.
• Professional ownership of issues
• Knowledge of:- scripting languages, ksh, Perl, Java, CGI, Visual Basic, HTML and XML.

Skills Desired

• Degree in computer science or equivalent
• Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Excel
• Experience with Microsoft .NET
• Knowledge of C, C++

Morgan Stanley is an equal opportunities employer. We work to provide a supportive and inclusive environment where all individuals can maximise their full potential.