Organisational Structure:
Research Application Support (RAS) is a dedicated application support and service delivery function of the top-ranked Research department of UBS Investment Bank. Distinct from IT Development and IT Production, RAS control and regulate the production environment on behalf of the Research Management team, Analysts\Associates and the Equity Research & Distribution (ER&D) development team. ER&D is a stream within the overall Equity IT team.

The role is primarily Problem Management based, in which individuals use their project management skills to track issues to full resolution and maintain the support procedures within the department. A portion of the role will also be dedicated to Level 2 support of the Research application suite.

Scope and Impact:
The team work directly with the line of business systems used by Research & Distribution teams, from data modelling, to document and production creation, through compliance and regulatory checking, and finally to distribution to internal and external clients. RAS provide 2nd line support, while gate keeping production and maintaining responsibility for configuration management.

Individuals will project manage infrastructure initiatives from proposal through implementation, leveraging highly skilled contract staff with specialist skills to achieve the highest operational efficiency, improving the working environment for the analysts and associates.

These systems are used globally and the team is structured with representatives in London, New York, Sydney and Singapore. Intercontinental travel will be required throughout the year to build these relationships.

The RAS team sits on the Research floors, alongside the sector teams, and interact with the users as a normal course of duty. As such, acting and talking fast on your feet will be required, in addition to the ability to propose creative solutions to new problems.

The core team of support analysts are responsible for the process management and the overall service delivery to the Research department, and therefore are the proxy for analysts and the Research management team and manage the relationship between IT Outsource firms, IT vendors, IT Production and contract staff. Thus, candidates must demonstrate high potential to learn and grow, and in return, much investment is made in technical training, professional management and business related training, as well as travel for relationship building with the IT Development team.

As global Problem Manager for the organization, this individual will be responsible for resolving the root cause of incidents with the ultimate goal of eliminating their recurrence. The Problem Manager will be faced with incidents but may have very little detail regarding the root cause and will be required to pull together the key players in the incident to determine why it happened and what actions are needed to prevent it; this individual will ensure the action points are completed. Additionally, the Problem Manager will proactively seek out existing issues that can be tracked down and resolved.

Overall Responsibilities:

Problem Manager duties include, but are not limited to:
• Carry out Trend analysis on all support calls and investigate calls most frequently logged.
• Review open Production Issues with Development Teams, Business Analysts, and Support Analysts to determine and prioritize solutions.
• Follow up on all application outages to ensure that root cause is determined and full preventative measures are put in place.
• Proactively seek out problems with technology and processes that are impacting the business, propose solutions, and engage the relevant parties to resolve.
• Coordinate urgent, unplanned infrastructure changes, such as server or desktop patching, within the department
• Review support processes for resolving and documenting support calls, improving the process as necessary and ensuring all policies are adhered to by the global team
• Manage the team’s Service Delivery Framework, which forms the basis for our contract with our off-shore Level 1 support desk.
• Own all departmental reporting, including those reports which measure the Level 1 and 2 teams’ performance as well as progress reports for senior management.
• Attend meetings to discuss Bank-wide IT problems to leverage Problem Management practices and techniques outside of the organization

Support Analysts duties include, but are not limited to:
• Define strategies for infrastructure standards across the department, then argue their merit within the department, and get them agreed by all
• Manage departmental projects from beginning to end, possibly implementing on one’s own or liaising with others on the team or in the department to implement.
• Develop new tools and applications to be used within the department and by the Business. Write code to implement new functionality in and fix problems with existing applications.
• During support shifts, resolve day-to-day support queries from analysts, ensuring effective and timely resolution.
• Conduct self directed investigations into data irregularities, and proactively identify and resolve potential system problems
• Take ownership of the issues, through root cause analysis and resolution with either development, IT production or external vendors
• Develop solid relationships with infrastructure teams and leverage the relationships to improve system stability and availability through configuration changes and external factors
• Proactively review infrastructure changes and assess the risk
• Communicate changes and potential risks to the regional and global RAS team, as well as to the broader Developer community
• As a RAS representative within a DEV team, draft and maintain application documentation for training, cross-training, troubleshooting and UBS infrastructure
• Participate in business driven rapid application development (RAD) projects promoting coding, production, branding and compliance standards.
• Evaluate the potential of new technologies and strategies adopted by the Enterprise IT department and manage the implementation across the global department to improve efficiency and reduce cost.

Basic Qualifications:
• Four year degree (BA/BS) or international equivalent in IT, Economics, Engineering, Math or Business
• Minimum 3 years experience in SQL
• Minimum 3 years experience in UNIX
• Minimum 3 years experience in UNIX
• Minimum 3 years experience in basic programming language(C++, C#, JAVA, etc.)

Preferred Qualifications:
• Candidates must be able to demonstrate project management skill utilized in previous roles, showing that they are able to execute a major initiative from beginning to end with minimal management oversight or direction.
• Individuals will need to be able to run with a large project that is only vaguely defined in the beginning, locate sources of information on the subject, query those sources to learn about the current state of affairs, gather input from stakeholders on what needs to be delivered, and then use this information to make decisions about how to move forward with the project and draft a strategy.
• Candidates must be well-versed in the art of persuasion, able to tactfully argue strategies with members of the department who challenge it and obtain their buy-in.
• Candidates must have the ability to draft a clear project plan and communicate that plan to all stakeholders throughout each phase of the lifecycle.
• Candidates must have prior experience as a developer. While this is not entirely a software development role, it does involve development projects that the individual will be required to implement with minimal oversight.
• Candidates must have technical ability and communication skills to identify technical improvements in our applications and infrastructure and work with the appropriate development teams and architects to suggest them.
• The candidate must be a self-starter, able to identify projects and areas for improvement in the department on their own, gain buy-in for the project from team management, and see through to completion.
• Candidates must be highly proactive, seeking out problems or potential issues.
• Individuals must be persistent and possess strong influencing skills in order to draw solutions out of other individuals or teams
• Candidates must be well organized, able to track several projects and items simultaneously and report back to affected parties on progress.
• Individuals must be high potential, demonstrating ability to take on today’s tasks and grow into expanded roles and responsibilities quickly.
• Candidates will be required to travel infrequently, in order to build relationships with the global RAS team, as well as the development teams based in London.
• Individuals must be able to diagnose problems, define and co-ordinate the implementation of solutions with other groups or resolve the problem themselves.
• Individuals must be able to listen to analyst issues, ask questions, and diagnose problems quickly
• Individuals must demonstrate a willingness to ensure problem resolution, getting involved with a variety of technologies and business areas, and providing appropriate feedback to other relevant IT groups.
• Individuals must be able to set priorities quickly, and communicate those priorities effectively to production teams.
• Individuals must possess verbal and written communication skills and be customer service orientated.
• Individuals will be highly committed: reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy are essential to ensure a courteous and efficient service is provided with tact and patience. The ability to manage a tense situation is a must.
• The successful candidate should be a good team player and should have high potential to learn new skills quickly, be self-motivated, flexible and thorough. They should also be able to respond well under pressure.
• The candidate should have a good customer focused attitude and be a problem owner and solver. They should be able to juggle several production problems as well as project work at the same time.
Experience with Excel VBA programming will be useful when assisting in data modelling
• Experience with Sybase and Oracle preferred
• Experience in basic programming language(C++, C#, JAVA, etc.)is desireable.