Support Engineer - Linux

The Role 

Support Engineers ensure the smooth running of the development estate within Man Technology by providing front line support for our technology platform. This platform underlies much of what Man Group does and it is essential that the developer experience is a good one; this team focuses on that experience. 

They provide a single interface to the wide world of our technology platform, providing first and second line support. This includes triaging new issues as they arise; redirecting if appropriate, resolving if possible, escalating as necessary. 

They are responsible for owning problems from beginning to end, ensuring that the request is resolved in a manner acceptable to the raiser, or handing over to another team to take over this responsibility. 

Additionally, the team will identify and address common problems at a more holistic level, including reporting where problems are causing pain, or where they might not have been appreciated by the wider technical audience as needing a better resolution. They are often the first place where wide-spread issues will be noticed. 

Engineers will interact with a wide variety of users; developers of all levels of experience, quants, traders, investment managers, middle and back office staff, and any other team that might have cause to use our platform. 

Problems will range from simple "how do I access this system?" questions, to complex issues that require knowledge across many domains and technologies and might require troubleshooting, bug fixes or infrastructure changes. 

Responsibilities: 

• Owning user issues from the point of reporting though to resolution 

• Tying together the various specialised support functions by providing a single interface for users 

• Triage the queue of issues effectively and efficiently. This includes acknowledging the user, understanding the issue in its entirety, setting an appropriate priority and setting the expectation with the user 

• Resolving queries that need a light tough 

• Troubleshooting more difficult problems 

• Escalating to a specialist team if unable to assist directly 

• Champion and promote Service Improvement on an on-going basis to continually improve quality and user satisfaction 

• Highlight where common problems are not being adequately addressed 

• Report on the condition of the estate, making improvements and suggestions as appropriate 

• Building new headnodes, in accordance with our security requirements (there are Chinese walls between many departments), users' needs, and available capacity. 

• Troubleshoot and fixing issues related to docker, Kubernetes, and other distributed components 

• Troubleshooting and fixing issues related to networks, disk, memory, and CPU 

Our Technology 

Our systems run on Linux and most of our code is in Python3. For storage, we rely heavily on S3, Kafka, Postgres/Oracle, ArcticDB and MongoDB. 

We use RMDS/TREP and Kafka for data pipelines, Bitbucket for source control, Jenkins for continuous integration, Prometheus + Grafana for metrics collection, ELK for log shipping and monitoring, Docker for containerisation, Kubernetes for container orchestration, Airflow and Jenkins for scheduling, OpenStack for our private cloud, Ansible and Terraform for architecture automation, and Slack for internal communication. 

Our technology list is never static: we constantly evaluate new tools and libraries. 

Working Here 

Man Technology has a small company, no-attitude feel. It is flat structured, open, transparent and collaborative, and you will have plenty of opportunity to grow and have enormous impact on what we do. We are actively engaged with the broader technology community. 

• We host and sponsor London’s PyData and Machine Learning Meetups 

• We open-source some of our technology including parts of our Data Platform. See https://github.com/man-group 

• We regularly talk at leading industry conferences, and tweet about relevant technology and how we’re using it. See @ManQuantTech 

We’re fortunate enough to have a fantastic open-plan office overlooking the River Thames, and continually strive to make our environment a great place in which to work. We offer flexible working, competitive compensation, a generous holiday allowance, health and other benefits. We are also committed to continuous learning and development via coaching, mentoring, conference attendance and sponsoring academic and professional qualifications. 

Technology and Business Skills 

We strive to hire the brightest most highly skilled and passionate technologists.  

Essential 

• Strong analytical and documentation skills 

• Strong interpersonal skills and aptitude to interact with many different areas of business 

Advantageous 

• Strong technical grasp of Linux, preferably with Centos/Ubuntu 

• Seasoned individual who has worked in a similar position in a financial services organisation with a strong skill set in supporting linux OS 

• Exposure to containerisation technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker and Openstack 

• Fluency in one or more of the following: Python, Ansible or Terraform 

Personal Attributes 

• Strong academic record and a degree with high mathematical and computing content e.g. Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering or Physics 

• Intellectually robust with a keenly analytic approach to problem solving 

• Self-organised and focused on delivering value to the business with relentless efforts to improve process  

• Strong interpersonal skills: able to establish and maintain a close working relationship with quantitative researchers, traders and software engineering colleagues  

• Confident communicator: able to argue a point concisely and deal positively with conflicting views