Application Support Engineer

hackajob is collaborating with DXC Technology to connect them with exceptional tech professionals for this role.

Project Description: Application Support Engineer with ElasticSearch will be a member of the team that is responsible for the support and management of the infrastructure that supports the Bank's electronic business (known within other banks as Electronic Trading or Pre-Trade). This will be achieved by leveraging the technical expertise of other teams within UK ITS. Team members will work closely with core Infrastructure teams, development and the business responding to requests, fault reports, often being required to resolve issues quickly, under pressure and sometimes out of hours. In addition to business as usual activity there are a great number of infrastructure projects and tasks that must be completed. It also involves coordination of multiple teams globally to deliver the infrastructure, OS tuning expertise to optimize the performance of Forex (FX) and Fixed Income (FI) applications within the Bank.

Responsibilities:

• Data Science Integration: Integrate data science models and algorithms into existing applications to enhance decision-making processes and provide data-driven insights. Collaborate with data scientists to deploy, monitor, and maintain machine-learning models in production environments. Develop data pipelines and extract, transform and load (ETL) processes to support data integration and analysis. Experience with data science integration, machine-learning models, and data-processing frameworks is essential.
• DevOps and Application Management: Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design, implement, and maintain CI/CD pipelines for continuous application deployment and integration. Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize application performance, ensuring high availability and reliability. Implement automation strategies to streamline deployment, configuration management, and infrastructure scaling. Align with development teams to assist in ensuring applications are designed with operational excellence in mind. Strong proficiency in DevOps practices, tools (e.g., Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code.
• Solace and ITRS Platform Management: Administer, configure, and maintain Solace messaging infrastructure to ensure real-time and reliable communication between applications. Manage ITRS monitoring tools, configure alerts, and develop custom monitoring solutions to ensure timely identification and resolution of issues. Implement upgrades and patches to keep the Solace and ITRS platforms up to date.
• Application Design and Architecture: Act as a subject matter expert in diagnosing and resolving complex technical issues related to applications.
• Documentation and Knowledge Sharing: Maintain detailed documentation of systems, configurations, procedures, and troubleshooting steps. Share knowledge and best practices with team members to foster a collaborative learning environment.
• Innovation and Continuous Improvement: Stay current with industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in DevOps, data science, messaging, and monitoring. Identify opportunities for process optimization, automation, and efficiency improvements. Automation/Scripting (Python, Shell, SQL....) and development skills for administration, monitoring and support tools.

Mandatory Skills Description: Expert-level knowledge of the Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Beats), with proven experience in architecting, deploying, and managing ELK infrastructure across distributed, high-performance environments. Strong proficiency in DevOps practices, tools (e.g., Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure as code. Strong understanding of index lifecycle management (ILM), shard optimization, and cluster health monitoring to support low latency applications. Practical and working knowledge of IP networking and data flow within distributed systems. Experience integrating ELK with packet capture/analysis tools to enhance observability of real-time systems. Hands-on expertise in data pipeline creation, ingestion strategies, and performance tuning of Logstash and Beats for scalable telemetry. Scripting proficiency in Python and/or PowerShell to automate ELK deployment, monitoring, and alerting pipelines. Experience designing and working with APIs (REST/JSON/XML) and integrating third-party data sources into the ELK stack. Familiarity with trading infrastructures and protocols (FIX, Market Data, Order Entry, etc.), with a deep understanding of the demands of high-frequency and algorithmic trading environments. Working knowledge of security best practices, including RBAC, TLS, and audit logging in Elasticsearch. Comfortable with multi-site replication, cross-cluster search, and disaster recovery configurations for global deployment. Strong understanding of Linux systems, containers, and cloud-native observability stacks. Organized, self-driven, and able to manage priorities in a dynamic, high-performance trading environment.

Nice-to-Have Skills Description: Knowledge of Corvil and/or Pico tools is highly beneficial but not essential, particularly for ingesting network telemetry into Elasticsearch. Exposure to Solace, 29West, Tibco, or other low latency messaging platforms is advantageous for understanding event-driven architectures in financial systems. Experience with observability platforms such as ITRS Geneos and their integration with ELK is a strong plus.