Operations Lead (Platform Operations & Incident Management)

Role Overview

The Operations Lead will own the day-to-day operations and runtime health of our live, high-throughput financial trading and market data capture platform. This is a senior, hands-on role combining technical leadership and operational excellence.

In this position, you will define standard operating procedures, spearhead real-time incident command, directly manage the Tier 1 operations team, and act as the primary operational escalation point for platform stability, release execution, and critical service restoration.

Working Hours, Location & On-Call Alignment

• Primary Working Hours: Standard business hours in Vietnam (ICT).
• Cross-Regional Shift Alignment: Flexibility to align with UK operational hours (10:00 AM – 5:00 PM UK time) periodically based on platform releases, client onboarding, or operational demands.
• Emergency & On-Call Availability: Primary on-call owner for high-severity escalations (P1/P2) and platform emergencies requiring immediate intervention outside business hours.
• Work Arrangement: Hybrid / Remote-friendly. We provide comprehensive remote infrastructure support, recognizing that incident management and maintenance windows frequently occur outside standard office hours.

Key Responsibilities

1. Team Leadership & Operational Governance

• Lead, mentor, and organize the Tier 1 Operations / NOC team, ensuring continuous 24/7/365 operational readiness.
• Manage shift rotations, coverage planning, operational handovers, and key performance metrics (MTTA, MTTR, ticket volume).
• Establish a culture of ownership, blameless post-mortems, and systematic knowledge sharing.

2. Incident Command & Crisis Lifecycle Management

• Own the end-to-end incident management lifecycle: automated alert intake, triage, containment, escalation, resolution, and Post-Incident Reviews (PIR/RCA).
• Serve as the Incident Commander during major outages, coordinating engineering, infrastructure, and business stakeholders under pressure.
• Lead root-cause investigations alongside software engineering teams to prevent issue recurrence.

3. Hands-on Platform & Infrastructure Operations

• Execute production deployments, hotfixes, routine releases, and environment maintenance windows.
• Perform infrastructure-level actions when automated recovery fails: pod restarts (Kubernetes), container debugging, cloud instance cycles, or bare-metal server reboots.
• Perform weekly and post-maintenance system health checks—specifically validating consolidated market tape feeds, ingestion pipelines, and core processing engines following weekend maintenance.

4. High-Stakes External & Executive Communication

• Draft and deliver timely, accurate operational communications during major incidents, unplanned downtime, or emergency hotfixes.
• Confidently communicate technical status, impact, and mitigation steps directly to regulatory bodies, enterprise clients, data contributors, and internal executive leadership.

5. Process Engineering & Continuous Improvement

• Design, build, and continuously refine operational runbooks, escalation matrices, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and change management workflows.
• Identify operational toil and collaborate with development and SRE teams to improve monitoring telemetry, health checks, and alerting thresholds.

Required Skills & Experience

• 4+ years of proven leadership experience in Platform Operations, NOC, SRE, or Tier 1/Tier 2 technical support environments managing mission-critical systems.
• Deep proficiency in structured incident response frameworks (ITIL or modern DevOps equivalents), handling P1/P2 emergencies, and using enterprise tools (e.g., PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira Service Management).
• Practical experience with Linux systems, networking diagnostics (DNS, TCP/IP, routing, latency checks), and containerized environments (Kubernetes/Docker).
• Exceptional written and verbal English communication skills, with demonstrated poise when addressing executive stakeholders, enterprise partners, or external regulatory entities.
• Willingness and discipline to manage out-of-hours on-call rotations and participate in unscheduled incident resolution.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience with high-frequency trading platforms, financial exchange architectures, market data feeds (FIX, ITCH, OUCH), or regulated financial data capture systems.
• Practical familiarity with AWS or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) networking, monitoring, and compute services.
• Working knowledge of Bash, Python, or shell scripting to automate repetitive runbook tasks and health diagnostics.
• Demonstrated track record of building, structuring, or scaling an operations/support function from the ground up for a growing platform.