Vice President, Application Engineer, MarkitWire
Role Summary
The Markit Wire platform is a highly resilient and scalable system that allows the parties involved in trading derivative financial products to quickly and efficiently agree on the terms of the contract and to create a legally binding agreement between them. It supports Interest Rate, Credit and Equity Derivatives (Commodity derivatives will also be added this year) and it supports the workflow for bilateral, brokered and prime brokered origination plus lifecycle events such as splits and allocations, novation, amendment, cancellation and option exercise. Current volumes are more than 7,000 trades per day on average with a maximum of about 2,000 logged in users at any one time.
The server infrastructure is based on SUN/Solaris, C++ and Oracle. It is distributed over 8 multi core servers in two data centres and is multi threaded to support very high levels of concurrency and fault tolerance. Access to the service are via C APIs and through user applications written either in VC++ (downloaded and installed on a local desktop) or Dynamic HTML accessed through a browser. Extensive use is made of MFC for the VC++ application and Boost is used widely within the server infrastructure. The applications and API also contain an interpreter for a proprietary scripting language – “Mark Pascal”. This scripting language is used to add input fields and validation rules for extensions to the range of supported financial products. Adding a new financial instrument can be achieved exclusively with Mark Pascal unless it also requires modifications or extensions to the workflow between counterparties or changes to the application beyond data capture.
The development team is currently composed of 12 programmers and 5 Database specialists, all of a very high calibre and with extensive experience in complex systems engineering. We are planning to expand the team with engineers who will specialise in developing business functionality while we extend and accelerate the re-factoring exercise which has begun in 2008. Ultimately this re-factoring will provide a new framework for developing business solutions – including replacement of the Mark Pascal technology with a commercial scripting language such as Python, Ruby or Lua.
Duties and Accountabilities
Reporting to the CTO, the Vice President, Application Engineer, MarkitWire will be tasked with adding features and functionality to the Markit Wire electronic confirmations platform.
Business Competencies
- Training and experience in the software engineering process and tools – configuration management, databases, programming languages, operating systems, project planning, testing and systems monitoring technology.
- Experience in at least one high level language (ideally C++ but Java, C# etc would be acceptable)
- Experience with application development using a scripting language such as Perl, Python, Ruby, TCL or Lua
- An understanding of systems architecture – the client/server model, inter process communication, multi threading etc.
- Experience with technology associated with the WEB including HTML, Javascript, XML/XSLT, and SOAP is desirable.
Personal Competencies
- A degree in computer technology or another science discipline and relevant industry experience.
- Knowledge of the capital markets and derivatives trading is an advantage but is not a pre-requisite for consideration.
The Contact
Interested applicants should send their CV and a covering letter to careers.europe@markit.com citing "Vice President, Application Engineer, MarkitWire" in the subject line.