Technical Operations Leader
PEAK6 is a leading investment firm headquartered in Chicago. More than 20 years ago, we were one of the first firms to develop sophisticated proprietary technology in our trading business. Today, we leverage our technical ingenuity and operational ability across several investment areas. We cover everything, spanning from early- to mid-stage growth capital, operational control, trading, and sports management while lending an eye and providing value to the customer. Over the years, we have built and operated several leading financial technology firms and today our team includes a digital wealth clearinghouse, an outsource provider of flood insurance, a Premier League soccer team, a value investment arm, an incubation lab, and more.
As Technical Operations Leader you will lead the operations team providing mission critical support for our cutting-edge trading platform and applications. You’ll be responsible for our technical operations strategy, improving our day to day operations while translating trading desk needs into tactical priorities. You’ll also be a champion for engineering excellence, assessing and guiding our teams to ensure the that our trading platform and all trading applications are well-documented, observable, monitored, and performant. As Director, you will have ownership over our operational capabilities and overall performance reporting incentivizing teams to set and reach uptime objectives, service level agreements, and overall operational excellence.
You'll be responsible for:
- Overseeing progress in achieving operational/production goals and objectives, especially with respect to tier 1 support, quality, cost and service to internal customers and stakeholders.
- Taking the responsibility for uptime, data accuracy, and integrity.
- Engaging with trading and development teams that need support and provide insights on prioritizing what to fix and why.
- Partnerning with the development teams to get reliability changes scheduled into sprints.
- Driving documentation and process culture within the firm to hold development and trading teams accountable for the software they’ve built being well-documented, observable, monitorable, and with proper alerting.
- Championing instrumentation, automation and general best practices across the organization.
- Building dashboards and other tools to enable the goals of the Technical Operations team.
- Ensuring operations are in full compliance with all company and regulatory requirements.
- Providing key leadership and management for the TechOps team members reporting to you
- Building and sustaining a culture of collaboration and teamwork to maintain a flow of information between TechOps and other Development and Infrastructure Teams.
- Being a technical escalation point for your team.
- Providing weekly reports on system availability, response, and capacity.
You’ll gain loads of experience in this role but before you do, you should have:
- 3+ years leading site reliability engineering or tech operations teams.
- At least 5 years site reliability, production, or systems engineering experience.
- Infrastructure and application instrumentation subject matter expertise familiar with SLOs, SLAs, and quantifying system performance.
- Experience with scripting and automation using Python, SaltStack, or similar tooling.
- Knowledge of Linux system administration and application orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker, etc)
- The ability to query database systems using SQL or equivalent query languages.
- Experience managing hybrid IaaS/PaaS across both on-premise and cloud native environments
- A BS in CS, EE, CE, or related industry experience.
- The ability to conceptualize, implement, and drive improvement around team structure and process.
- A results driven approach with the ability to establish priorities and execute on solutions.
- Strong technical problem-solving abilities, with the ability to quickly understand technical systems using a variety of methods. These include, reading code, documentation, logs, and digging into raw data through various interfaces.
- Curiosity and eagerness to learn and improve on existing approaches.
- Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to cater your approach to technical and non-technical audiences.
All of our team members have these traits. You should, too.
Collaboration Grit
Adaptability Ownership
As a PEAK6 Technical Operations Leader you can enjoy:
- Generous medical, vision and dental plans
- Matching 401(k) programs
- Adoption assistance & family leave
- Sabbatical program
- Massage days
- Poker tournament with a grand prize of a World Series of Poker buy in
- Sports leagues
- Corn hole tournaments
- Annual PEAK6 Party
- Yoga classes
- Tuition reimbursement
- Lasik eye discount
- Philanthropy events
- Annual wellness screens and flu shots
- Bagel Fridays/expiration lunches
- Birthday gifts
- Charitable matching gift program