Director, Application Support SGAM

Scotiabank•Dallas, TX

5d•Onsite

About The Position

As Director, Application Support – Asset Management, you will play a pivotal leadership role in ensuring the stability, reliability, and continuous improvement of mission-critical applications that support the end-to-end investment lifecycle within Scotia Global Asset Management (SGAM). This role will own production support across SGAM's full technology stack — spanning front-office order management and execution, middle-office compliance and risk, and back-office settlement and fund accounting. You will serve as the senior escalation point for all critical application incidents, partnering with investment teams, operations, technology, and vendor partners to minimize disruption and drive a culture of operational excellence. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role that requires a rare combination of deep asset management domain expertise, hands-on technical proficiency across databases and cloud infrastructure, and the leadership presence to manage demanding stakeholders effectively as critical issues arise. You will collaborate with senior stakeholders across business and technology, lead large cross-functional support teams, and drive continuous improvement at scale — all while fostering a culture of accountability, innovation, and inclusivity.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or a related discipline.
10+ years of experience in technology roles within asset management, capital markets, or financial services, with a minimum of 4 years in a senior leadership capacity overseeing application support or production engineering teams.
Proven track record of managing large-scale application support functions in regulated financial environments, with demonstrated ability to maintain stability under pressure.
In-depth, hands-on knowledge of the full investment trade lifecycle — front office (order management, execution), middle office (compliance, risk, performance), and back office (settlement, fund accounting, reconciliation).
Proven experience supporting two or more of the following platforms in a production environment: Charles River IMS, SimCorp Dimension, Bloomberg TSOX/FXGO, Candeal, MarketAxess, Virtu Triton, CTM (Omgeo), DTCC, or SSC&Net.
Strong proficiency in SQL query analysis, performance tuning, and troubleshooting on SQL Server and Oracle, with the ability to independently write and interpret complex queries, stored procedures, and execution plans.
Demonstrated experience supporting and troubleshooting Power BI and MicroStrategy environments in a production context, including data refresh failures, model issues, and user access governance.
Hands-on experience with production workloads on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), GCVE, and Microsoft Azure, including familiarity with cloud-native observability and monitoring tooling.
Exceptional communication , stakeholder management, and leadership skills , with a proven ability to manage complex, high-pressure relationships — including senior business executives and investment professionals — during critical incidents.
Strong problem solver with demonstrated analytical capabilities and the ability to remain calm and decisive under time-critical conditions.
Excellent organizational skills with strong attention to detail and a continuous improvement mindset.
Curious and collaborative mindset with a drive to automate, simplify, and reduce operational risk.

Nice To Haves

CFA designation
Cloud certifications (GCP Professional Cloud Architect, Azure Administrator)

Responsibilities

Own end-to-end production support for all critical asset management applications, including, but not limited to Charles River IMS, SimCorp Dimension, Bloomberg TSOX/FXGO, Candeal, MarketAxess, Virtu Triton, CTM (Omgeo), DTCC, SSC&Net, and proprietary in-house portfolio management systems.
Act as the senior escalation point for Severity 1 and Severity 2 incidents, driving rapid triage, root-cause analysis, and permanent remediation.
Establish and enforce SLAs, SLOs, and on-call protocols aligned with the criticality of trading and settlement workflows.
Lead post-incident reviews, translating learnings into runbooks, monitoring improvements, and architectural recommendations.
Manage and coordinate support activities across regional teams and third-party vendors to ensure consistent coverage and accountability.
Apply deep front-to-back investment knowledge to diagnose issues spanning the full trade lifecycle — order generation, execution, trade confirmation, settlement, reconciliation, and fund accounting.
Partner with portfolio managers, traders, and operations teams to understand business workflows and translate issues into precise technical requirements for engineering squads.
Ensure support processes account for the nuances of equities, fixed income, FX, and derivatives across exchange-traded and OTC markets.
Serve as a subject matter expert on investment data flows, including integration with Bloomberg, Refinitiv, and other market data providers.
Troubleshoot and resolve production issues involving SQL Server and Oracle databases, including query performance degradation, deadlocks, data integrity anomalies, and ETL failures.
Write and interpret complex SQL queries, stored procedures, and execution plans to diagnose data issues independently.
Support and maintain BI reporting environments — Power BI and MicroStrategy — ensuring data accuracy, report availability, and governance for investment, risk, and operations teams.
Collaborate with data engineering teams on pipeline failures and data quality issues impacting downstream investment analytics.
Oversee application support for workloads hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE), and Microsoft Azure.
Work closely with cloud and infrastructure teams to diagnose networking, containerization, and availability issues affecting production applications.
Champion observability best practices — logging, tracing, alerting, and dashboards — to shift the team from reactive to proactive support.
Contribute to resilience, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning for all critical investment applications.
Build trusted relationships with senior stakeholders across investment management, trading, operations, compliance, risk, and technology, providing clear and timely communication during critical incidents.
Manage stakeholder expectations under pressure, balancing urgency with accuracy and maintaining composure during high-severity events.
Prepare and deliver executive-level incident briefings, post-mortems, and operational health reports.
Act as a bridge between business lines and technology teams, translating operational pain points into prioritized improvement initiatives.
Influence and align diverse stakeholder groups across functions and geographies.
Build, lead, and mentor a large, high-performing cross-functional support team, including application support engineers, database administrators, and operations analysts.
Define team structure, on-call rotations, escalation paths, and career development frameworks.
Foster a culture of accountability, continuous learning, and knowledge sharing across regional support teams.
Promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within the team and across the organization.
Build and maintain a comprehensive application inventory with documented support runbooks, known-error databases, and dependency maps.
Define and track operational KPIs — MTTR, MTTD, incident volume, change success rate — and present trends to technology and business leadership.
Champion automation initiatives to reduce manual toil, including auto-remediation scripts, self-healing workflows, and intelligent alerting.
Ensure all change and incident processes comply with ITIL best practices and internal governance frameworks.