Trading Systems Support Lead, Risk & Quant Analytics

Company Introduction

Polymer Capital Management is a market-neutral, multi-manager investment platform based in and focused on Asia. Polymer combines established institutional support and deep knowledge of local financial markets with a dedication to discovering and developing the region's best investment talent. Polymer was established in conjunction with PAG, one of the world's largest Asia-focused alternative asset managers, in 2019.

Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Support Lead for Execution Systems to own the stability, monitoring, and operational excellence of our trading stack. This role sits at the intersection of trading, technology, investment teams and operations, ensuring the robustness and scalability of mission-critical systems including EMS, Trading GUI, middle office workflows, and Internalization engines.

The ideal candidate combines strong technical expertise with leadership capability, bringing structure to production support, deployment processes, and system observability in a fast-paced hedge fund environment.

Core Responsibilities

Production Support & Stability

• Lead L1/L2 support for Execution Management Systems (EMS), Trading GUI, Middle Office Workflows and Internalization
• Ensure high availability and performance of trading systems across regions and asset classes
• Own incident management lifecycle: detection, triage, escalation, resolution, and post-mortems
• Drive root cause analysis (RCA) and implement preventative measures
• Coordinate closely with trading desks, investment teams, middle office and developers during live issues

Monitoring & Observability

• Design and implement comprehensive real-time monitoring and alerting frameworks
• Define KPIs/SLAs for system health, latency, order flow, and execution quality
• Improve visibility across:

o Order lifecycle and execution flow

o Market data ingestion and processing

o Internal crossing/internalization logic

• Reduce noise through intelligent alerting and automation

Deployment & Change Management

• Establish a structured and controlled deployment framework (CI/CD alignment with production safety)
• Lead release planning, production rollouts, and rollback strategies
• Enforce best practices around:

o Change management

o Version control and release traceability

o Environment consistency (dev/UAT/prod)

• Partner with engineering teams to streamline deployment automation

Platform Ownership

• Act as the primary owner of execution platform reliability
• Maintain deep understanding of:

o EMS/OEMS workflows and broker connectivity

o Middle office trade processing

o Internalization and smart order routing logic

• Continuously identify system bottlenecks and areas for performance improvement

Process & Team Leadership

• Build and lead a structured support function with clear runbooks, escalation paths, and SLAs
• Mentor junior support engineers and promote operational best practices
• Drive a culture of proactive support vs reactive firefighting
• Establish documentation standards for systems, processes, and incident learnings

Requirements

Technical Expertise

• Strong experience supporting EMS/OEMS platforms in a buy-side or sell-side environment
• Solid understanding of:

o FIX protocol, order lifecycle, execution workflows

o Market microstructure and trading systems

• Familiarity with internalization, crossing engines, or dark pool logic is highly desirable
• Experience with monitoring tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, Splunk)
• Knowledge of Linux environments, scripting (Python/Shell), and basic SQL
• Proven ability to support and standardize deployments across multiple infrastructure models-cloud, on-prem, and exchange colocation-including both virtualized and bare-metal environments

Production Management

• Proven track record in high-availability production support environments
• Experience implementing monitoring, alerting, and incident response frameworks
• Strong exposure to deployment pipelines and release management

Leadership & Stakeholder Management

• Prior experience leading or mentoring support teams
• Ability to communicate effectively with traders, quants, and engineers
• Strong ownership mindset with the ability to operate under pressure

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in a platform hedge fund or multi-PM environment
• Exposure to multi-asset trading (equities, futures, FX)
• Knowledge of low-latency systems and performance tuning
• Familiarity with cloud or hybrid infrastructure models

Success Profile

• Brings structure and discipline to production environments
• Anticipates issues before they impact trading
• Builds scalable monitoring and deployment frameworks
• Acts as a trusted partner to trading and technology teams

Benefits

Some of our Benefits

• 20 Days of Paid annual leave
• Life / Medical group insurance
• Gym Subsidy