Systems Engineer Lead

Phi Partners is a Capital Markets Technology consultancy, working in a specific context, providing specialist services with a niche focus. We are proud to work with more than 60 financial institutions, including some of the biggest and best known banking brands in the world.

Our People

Our people are project managers, business analysts, technical architects, developers, testers and support analysts – from recent technology or business graduates, to seasoned professionals with 25 years’ experience.

Our Context

We specialise in sell-side and buy-side trading technology. We work primarily with investment banks, but increasingly also with asset management firms and hedge funds. Our clients are IT managers or managers in Trading and Risk business departments who need our help defining, implementing or supporting their technology. Our expert consultants understand the financial products and the business processes that support them.

Our Focus

We specialise in specific vendor trading applications with a speciality in Valuation and Risk.

Summit, Sophis, and Murex are the best-known Vendor technologies in this context – we know them inside out: how to configure them, customise them, integrate them, use them, support them. In fact, we know them so well that we have partnerships with the vendors and often provide our experts to the vendors themselves, for specific projects.

Across and beyond these trading applications, we have particular expertise in quantative development – producing complex valuation and risk measures with bespoke pricing models, integrated with the client’s other technology.

Our Services

We provide individual experts to work under a client’s direction, or whole self-managing teams under the direction of one of our own senior experts. Our people provide services to support or change the client’s technology, or advise on technology choices.

We support our clients with change projects relating to their evolving business requirements – for example introduction of new financial products or responding to new regulations. We regularly undertake change projects relating to a client’s changing technology landscape: anything from a multi-year projects for a greenfield trading system implementation, or development of a cross-asset bespoke valuation service, to building an individual interface or configuring a back office workflow. Migrations of data or business functionality between systems, and system upgrades are both core parts of our business.

We also have a small product devlopment team: we offer a market-leading on-line data archiving solution for Summit, with plans for other specialised products in the pipeline.

Our Company

Phi was founded in 2004 and has since become a 200 people strong organization. We are growing, but we strive to retain our “small company” feel: we treat everyone as an individual and even the most junior employee at Phi knows the CEO!

Our headquarters is in London, and we serve our clients globally - from our offices in the UK, France, Germany and Romania, as well as from client premises across Europe and beyond.

Our Bucharest office (11, Dinu Vintila, Euro Tower, 13th Floor, 2nd District, 021101) was established in 2009 and is home to more than half our workforce running more than half of our business. Here you can find an energetic and dynamic delivery team offering speialist consultancy services across all roles and seniorities. We support clients all over Europe from our Bucharest offices, and there are also plenty of opportunities for our Bucharest team members to work overseas. The Phi Partners Operations functions are also based in Bucharest.

Technical skills:

• Very good understanding of the way a software batch is executing (containing several tens of thousands of jobs – executable and scripts): various sub-batches execute in parallel, dependencies between jobs and their hierarchical organisation, managing error conditions
• Very good understanding of how a batch scheduler works and can be used to run software batches (CONTROL-M preferable)
• Very good understanding of how source control systems are used in versioning software trees and their deployment to development / test / production environments (RTC preferable)
• Very god understanding of the Windows operating system (Windows server 2008, Windows 7)
• Very good scripting abilities (Windows command line scripting - .cmd,.bat; PERL scripting)
• Very good SQL and Database (Oracle) knowledge
• Very good knowledge of XML standard and related technologies (DOM, XPATH, XSLT)
• Good C / C++ skills
• Working knowledge of Excel and Word
• Excellent analytical skills, being able to break down a complex problem into manageable size subcomponents
• English – written / spoken to a very good level; French is a plus
• Summit system knowledge is a big plus
• Capital market awareness is a plus

Previous Experience

• Has been part of a development / software engineering team of medium / small size. Has worked with schedulers, source control management systems and used workflow management tools. More than 10 years overall IT industry experience.

Software Development & Testing

• Implements, tests and documents solutions to complex problems; assists in the implementation of software which forms part of a properly engineered information or communications system.
• Creates test scripts and supporting data, working to the specifications provided.
• Executes and records test cases in accordance with project test plans.
• Reports test activities and results.

Data Analysis

• Applies data analysis and data modelling techniques to establish, modify or maintain a data structure and its associated components (entity descriptions, relationship descriptions, attribute definitions).

Systems Design

• Designs the components and workflow of large systems: physical data flows, file layouts, common routines and utilities, program specifications or prototypes, and backup, recovery and restart procedures.

Influence

• Will be in regular contact with customers, suppliers and partners. Also, will mentor a team of up to 10 people and will decide on the best technical approach in solving tasks.