Head of Platform Operations
CLS
About CLS
CLS is the trusted party at the centre of the global FX ecosystem. Utilized by thousands of counterparties, CLS makes FX safer, smoother and more cost effective. Trillions of dollars’ worth of currency flows through our systems each day.
Created by the market for the market, our unrivalled global settlement infrastructure reduces systemic risk and provides standardization for participants in many of the world’s most actively traded currencies. We deliver huge efficiencies and savings for our clients: in fact, our approach to multilateral netting shrinks funding requirements by over 96% on average, so clients can put their capital and resources to better use.
CLS products are designed to enable clients to manage risk most effectively across the full FX lifecycle – whether through more efficient processing tools or market intelligence derived from the largest single source of FX executed data available to the market.
Our ambition to make a positive difference starts with our people. Our values – Protect, Improve, Grow – underpin everything that we do at CLS and define and shape a supportive and inclusive working environment in which everyone is encouraged to be open and forward-thinking.
Reporting into the Head of Infrastructure; the role is primarily responsible for ensuring a consistent and high-quality level of technical operational support is delivered for all on-premise datacenter and cloud hosted applications and infrastructure services. The role encompasses establishing Site Reliability Engineering practices within CLS in support of our public cloud strategy.
Essential Job Functions:
- Responsible for ensuring the Production service is prioritised with all service incidents, problems and requests responded to and actioned. Act as an escalation point for high priority application and infrastructure service support incidents and ensure the function is meeting and exceeding agreed business SLAs, KPIs and performance targets.
- Establish and SRE practice within the CLS Infrastructure team, developing a roadmap and project plan to include training plans and service level metrics. Also working closely with Infrastructure Engineering to develop strategies fr tooling, observability and automation.
- Ensure the functions risk controls are documented, regularly reviewed and tested. Identified operational risk issues are captured with appropriate risk issue actions tracked to agreed timelines. Define and implement standards and procedures to adhere to current best practice and drive continual service improvement.
- Vendor relationship owner for several critical CLS managed service providers and service delivery contracts including 24/7 storage support, network support and datacenter hosting services. Budget and manage software and hardware maintenance contracts.
- Responsible for hardware and software End of life/Support asset tracking and lifecycle management processes. Includes planning, managing and sponsoring BAU and project asset upgrades to maintain a supported position.
- Responsible for managing service resilience including backup and disaster recovery process and procedures. Plan and conduct quarterly DR tests for all datacenter and cloud hosted services ensuring any findings are captured and addressed.
Minimum Education Required:
- Bachelor’s degree educated or equivalent
- Other relevant industry standard IT certification desired e.g. AWS / Citrix / Microsoft / VMware / RedHat Linux / Cisco
Minimum job-related Experience Required:
- Must have strong technical operational management support experience delivering business and industry critical Production application and infrastructure services both on-premise datacenter and cloud hosted.
- Strong experience leading and managing global infrastructure and application technical support functions across multiple geographical locations essential.
- Minimum of two years experience leading or working within an established SRE function ideally within a financial services organization
- Solid understanding of monitoring and managing key service KPIs/SLAs and delivering a world class service.
- Operational risk and control management processes.
- Datacenter operations / cloud service platform e.g. AWS/Azure management.
- Strong vendor management experience for managed service providers and service support contracts.
- Asset management and lifecycle (EOS/EOL) process management.
- Planning and leading disaster recovery failovers of IT systems and services.
- Experience of working in a regulated financial services / banking organization.
Special Skills/Knowledge:
- Ability to demonstrate strong management and leadership qualities.
- Possess a strong service-oriented mind set , can consistently deliver a high level of service to the business.
- Strong team working skills, both as a contributor and facilitator.
- Has the ability to influence decisions.
- A high level of presentation and communications skills with the ability to communicate confidently with both business and technical staff at all levels.
- Proactive individual who can take the lead in engaging with the business stakeholders.
- Demonstrate strong technical, analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Able to manage their time effectively and prioritise their own and their team’s workload in order to meet changing demands from the business.
- Ability to communicate complex technical issues to different levels of management.
Our commitment to employees
At CLS, we celebrate diversity and consider this to be one of our strongest assets. We are committed to fostering an environment in which everyone feels comfortable to be who they are, and inclusion is valued. All employees have access to our inclusive benefits, including:
- Holiday - UK/Asia: 25 holiday days and 3 ‘life days’ (in addition to bank holidays). US: 23 holiday days.
- 2 paid volunteer days so that you can actively support causes within your community that are important to you.
- Generous parental leave policies to ensure you can enjoy valuable time with your family.
- Parental transition coaching programmes and support services.
- Wellbeing and mental health support resources to ensure you are looking after yourself, and able to support others.
- Affinity Groups (including our Women’s Forum, Black Employee Network and Pride Network) in support of our organisational commitment to embrace and always be learning more about DE&I.
- Hybrid working to promote a healthy work/life balance, enabling employees to work collaboratively in the office when needed and work from home when they don’t.
- Active support of flexible working for all employees where possible.
- Monthly ‘Heads Down Days’ with no meetings across the whole company.
- Generous non-contributory pension provision for UK/Asia employees, and 401K match from CLS for US employees.
- Private medical insurance and dental coverage.
- Social events that give you opportunities to meet new people and broaden your network across the organisation.
- Annual flu vaccinations.
- Discounts and savings and cashback across a wide range of categories including health and retail for UK employees.
- Discounted Gym membership – Complete Body Gym Discount/Sweat equity program for US employees.
- All employees have access to Discover – our comprehensive learning platform with 1000+ courses from LinkedIn Learning.
- Access to frequent development sessions on a number of topics to help you be successful and develop your career at CLS.