Head of Index Technology
Morningstar, Inc., a leading global provider of independent investment research, is looking for an innovative and visionary leader to serve as the Head of Technology in Morningstar’s Index business.
The Group: The Index business is responsible for the creation and distribution of Morningstar’s Index Intellectual Property. The group develops new, innovative indexes for use by asset managers and asset owners in serving their clients investment needs. Morningstar Indexes distributes its data through Data Feeds and Data APIs to both internal and external customers. The individuals in the Index group thrive to ensure that we meet Morningstar’s high standards in developing indexes to satisfy a wide range of global clientele. The group must also meet internal and external data needs with high quality, high satisfaction, in a technologically sound manner.
The Role: The Head of Technology will report to the Managing Director, Index Operations. The selected candidate will take responsibility for the overall planning, execution, and success of technical projects; operating with scale, speed and quality. Working with other key technology and business leaders, the selected individual will establish best engineering practices and influence them through solid design decisions, processes, and tools across the broader engineering organization. The candidate will oversee a team of senior level engineers and will work with other areas in Indexes to constantly evolve our strategy to produce better end user outcomes and relevant offerings in the market. This position is located in our Chicago office.
Responsibilities
- Lead strategic technological planning to achieve business goals by prioritizing technology initiatives and determining future direction of the index group's technical strategy
- Develop and contribute to our business plans, staffing, budgeting and process decisions that support both long-term and short-term objectives of the Index group
- Work with team leads to continuously upgrade platforms, prioritizing initiatives that have the biggest impact on technical debt for the products
- Partner closely with index product leaders on strategic planning process, aligning technology vision and strategy with product and business direction, customer service strategy, growth strategies, and talent strategies
- Own non-functional requirements, technology standards, architectural direction, technical documentation, and quality of the code
- Maintain the highest levels of security, promoting a culture and practice of security awareness
- Assess and monitor the impact of new technologies on our markets and product lines
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience managing sizable technology organizations, with proven team building and leadership skills. Experience with an index provider, exchange or proprietary trading firm is highly desirable
- Bachelor of Science in CIS or related major required, with a Masters in CIS or finance preferred
- Ability to interface and project confidence and clarity directly with senior leaders both internally at Morningstar and externally with institutional clients
- Ability to develop a business technology strategy and convert strategic plans into actionable programs and projects
- Ability to attract and retain talent
- Ability to create and promote a culture of technology excellence and innovation
- Experience with Java, AWS and various data storage, big data technology and streaming data processing
- Experience with agile principles including test-driven development, continuous integration and test automation
- Creative thinker with the ability to solve problems
- Ability to communicate the technical possibilities and limitations of systems to non-technical colleagues in meaningful and constructive ways
- Pragmatist who is bold, willing to think big, and encourage teams to act decisively
- A belief in embracing both open-source and commercial tools and frameworks as well as SaaS, and having proven experience in making tradeoffs between competing alternatives