Head of Production, Americas

ICAP•New York, NY

6d•$230,000 - $250,000•Hybrid

About The Position

This role is to lead and evolve the production support function for a business-critical electronic trading platform, ensuring operational stability, service excellence, and continuous improvement while supporting business growth and client needs. RealQ brings together the respective legacies of Neptune Networks and Liquidnet Fixed Income, two platforms developed to address distinct aspects of credit market structure. RealQ has been established to combine these capabilities – bringing together standardised indicators of trading interest and electronic execution functionality – to support market participants in accessing information and interacting within credit markets.

Requirements

Degree or equivalent in statistics, maths, computer science preferred
Demonstratable applied knowledge of supporting multiple significant business critical technology implementations in a production context
Experience in a production management role within financial services, ideally for 5+ years.
Demonstrable experience of institutional fixed-income market structure and electronic credit trading workflows, including FIX/API connectivity, regulated venues, client and dealer integrations, and post-trade processes.
Demonstrable experience leading incident and problem management, production readiness, observability and operational resilience for business-critical technology platforms, including through significant transformation and strategic change.
Experienced leader, able to drive successful outcomes in an agile environment within financial services.
Ability to own a Production Support roadmap, use incident and service data to set priorities across stakeholders, and deliver measurable improvements through AI, automation and modern support tooling.
Ability to identify and negotiate appropriate budget to support delivery requirements.
Experience managing small to medium teams and facilitating positive outcomes in a large financial services organisation.
Capable of internalising and responding well to constructive challenging feedback.
Capable of balancing multiple conflicting priorities and managing stakeholder expectations honestly and appropriately.

Nice To Haves

Personable and engaging.
Effective communicator with an ability to adapt communication style to suit audience and context.
Strong relationship building and networking skills.
Demonstrates strong, objective customer focus.
Proactive, tenacious individual with ability to resolve issues and work autonomously or part of a team in a variety of contexts.
Creative and enthusiastic approach to new or existing challenges.
Willingness to challenge status quo and bring about positive change.

Responsibilities

Own the health of the RealQ production environment, with accountability for service stability, monitoring, operational resilience, production readiness and the safe implementation of change.
Lead incident and problem management end to end, ensuring effective recovery, clear stakeholder communication, root-cause analysis, accurate action tracking and permanent resolution of recurring issues.
Own and deliver the Production Support roadmap, prioritising improvements based on client impact, operational risk, recurring incidents and RealQ’s product and connectivity growth.
Modernise Production Support through AI, automation and improved tooling, reducing manual activity, accelerating diagnosis and enabling more proactive identification of service issues.
Build and lead an effective Production Support organisation, developing the required fixed-income, FIX, trading-platform and support capabilities and establishing clear ownership across Production Support, Engineering, Infrastructure and external service providers.
Responsibility for ensuring that you are fully aware of and adhere to internal policies that relate to you, your role or any other activities for which you have any level of responsibility. It is your responsibility to ensure compliance with operational risk requirements (e.g. cultural behaviours, security policies and regulatory requirements.)
Complete all mandatory training promptly and within the required deadlines.
Recruit, develop, coach and mentor disciplines within the teams. Ensure effective succession planning, talent & career management. Ensure continued employee engagement.
Responsibility for, and oversight of, any people issues that arise within the function liaising with appropriate stakeholders such as Senior Management, HR and Legal to ensure effective resolution whilst minimising operational risk
Define and provide oversight of the roles and responsibilities, within the function
Ensure that policy and procedure documents are maintained and updated as and when appropriate, to reflect the way in which the teams operate
Take ownership, where necessary, of any issues that may arise, in the day to day operating model of the function
Ensure that any cross-training is defined, implemented and completed, so as to not have any “single points of failure” within the teams