Application Support Engineer (Weekend Cover)
I’m working with a well-established financial technology provider that supplies trading technology and connectivity solutions to brokers and institutional clients. They’re hiring an Application Support Engineer to join their support function and take ownership of weekend operations alongside the existing Monday to Friday team.
The role
You’ll be the first line of technical response for client-facing operations, resolving operational and business issues and supporting the planning and delivery of client implementations. You’ll plan and run weekend activity, including software upgrades and migrations, client service requests, and live support over phone, email and chat.
Working pattern
This is a full-time role, working four weekdays and one weekend day each week. For the first 8 weeks you’ll be on a standard Monday to Friday schedule while you complete training, then move onto the rota.
Key responsibilities
Production monitoring and incident response
- Monitor production systems, triage alerts, and assess severity and business impact
- Investigate anomalies by correlating logs, metrics and traces to find root causes
- Choose and carry out the right fix (restarts, failovers, config changes, rollbacks), balancing speed against risk
- Judge when to act immediately and when to escalate to engineering
- Lead post-incident reviews and recommend process, monitoring or architectural improvements
Deployments and client implementations
- Plan and coordinate deployments, including risk assessment, validation, and go/no-go decisions
- Plan and deliver client implementations covering bridging, aggregation and reporting components
- Assess client connectivity requirements and infrastructure readiness, and advise on configuration and integration approaches
- Validate onboarding prerequisites (API credentials, connectivity parameters, spread and routing configuration) and flag gaps
- Work with client-facing teams to define requirements and confirm readiness for handover to steady-state support
Client support and trade-flow analysis
- Respond to client queries within SLA, giving clear, well-reasoned technical guidance
- Analyse trade execution issues, pricing anomalies and connectivity problems through FIX/API message flows, deciding whether they need operational action or engineering escalation
- Diagnose liquidity provider and platform connectivity issues, separating configuration, network and systemic causes
- Prioritise and escalate based on business impact, severity and client criticality (latency spikes, connectivity drops, trade discrepancies, configuration gaps)
Continuous improvement and governance
- Spot recurring issues and build automation (scripts, tooling, monitoring enhancements) with proper safety controls
- Improve runbooks, operational procedures and monitoring strategy
- Document decisions and outcomes for auditability
- Follow security best practice and change management, including careful handling of client credentials and sensitive configuration data
Essential skills and experience
- 3+ years in production operations, site reliability engineering, or technical support for mission-critical systems
- Basic Linux administration and networking knowledge (diagnostics, troubleshooting, performance analysis)
- Hands-on use of monitoring and observability tools
- Proven ability to analyse complex issues and make sound decisions under time pressure
- Strong written and verbal communication for incident documentation, client interaction and cross-team work
- Scripting in Python, Bash, PowerShell or similar for automation and reporting
- Direct experience supporting or onboarding technical client integrations (readiness checks, config validation, data flow verification)
- Familiarity with bridging, aggregation and reporting integration patterns, or the ability to pick them up quickly
Desirable skills
- Exposure to real-time data or financial technology environments
- Containers (Docker, ECS, Kubernetes)
- Streaming and messaging systems (Kafka, Kinesis or similar)
- Performance troubleshooting (resource usage, latency, responsiveness)
- Security hygiene (least privilege, credential handling)
- VMware virtualisation
- Administering MetaTrader (MT4/MT5) servers or related components
- Advanced PowerShell or wider programming (Go, Java, .NET) for tooling
- Supporting financial services clients in production triage situations
- Understanding of core market concepts (pricing, spreads, order flow)
- Brokerage middle or back office experience (trade capture, reconciliation, reporting)
- Automating repetitive operational tasks (scripted runbook wrappers, small tooling improvements)
Who this suits
This would suit someone from a production support, SRE or application support background, ideally with some exposure to trading or brokerage technology, who is comfortable making calls under pressure and wants real ownership of a weekend shift.