Production Support Specialist – Banking (Technology)

Job Description:

Job Title: Production Services Specialist - Banking (Technology)

Corporate Title:  Up to Vice President

Location:  Chester

Company Overview:

At Bank of America, we are guided by a common purpose to help make financial lives better through the power of every connection.  Responsible Growth is how we run our company and how we deliver for our clients, teammates, communities and shareholders every day.

One of the keys to driving Responsible Growth is being a great place to work for our teammates around the world. We’re devoted to being a diverse and inclusive workplace for everyone. We hire individuals with a broad range of backgrounds and experiences and invest heavily in our teammates and their families by offering competitive benefits to support their physical, emotional, and financial well-being.

Bank of America believes both in the importance of working together and offering flexibility to our employees. We use a multi-faceted approach for flexibility, depending on the various roles in our organization.

Working at Bank of America will give you a great career with opportunities to learn, grow and make an impact, along with the power to make a difference. Join us!

Location Overview:

Find us in the city of Chester, a destination renowned for its culture, history, and beauty. Working at Bank of America Chester offers a far-reaching global career for a world-renowned organisation, whilst being ideally situated against the backdrop of the rolling North Wales hills and the banks of the serene River Dee.

The Team:

Global Transaction Services & Global Corp & Investment Banking Technology Application Production Services

• Provides end-to-end accountability for production services and strategy for Global Banking covering Payments, Sales, Credit, Channels, DTS, Lockbox, Receivables, Commercial Card, Trade Finance, Middleware, and SWIFT
• Drives collaboration across CTI around maturity and stability projects to improve the delivery of business services
• Manages application Incidents, Service Requests, Problems, Events and Change  services and ensures alignment with Enterprise policies and procedures

Following a significant investment for the Business to expand across 17 international markets, there is a need to increase the number of team members available to support this, post go live support. The global team will be required to provide real time support for the Switzerland Real Time Payments (RTP) efforts 24 hours, 7 days a week.

Role Description:

• Application Production Support for the Bank of America’s Global Banking Applications, primary responsibilities are  identification and resolution of production incidents. Problem - post incident resolution to ascertain root cause, mitigating actions, drive and track permanent resolution. Guidance of incident and problem tickets through the enterprise ITSM tool.
• Capacity and Performance guidance.
• Working with development teams for take-on and training of new services or significant upgrades.
• Providing support for Audits (internal and external).
• Stakeholder guidance, working closely with Business and Operations partners to understand KPI metrics to measure service stability to prioritize defect fixes and enhancements

Responsibilities:

• Engage in and improve the whole lifecycle of services, from inception and design, through to deployment, operation and refinement.
• Support services before they go live through activities such as system design consulting, developing software platforms and frameworks, capacity planning, and launch reviews.
• Maintain services once they are live by measuring and monitoring availability, latency, and overall system health.
• Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity.
• Practice sustainable incident response and blameless postmortems.

What we are looking for:

• Considerable years of relevant IT experience i.e. Production or Release Support, ITIL, Technical Implementations, or equivalent
• Demonstrate flexibility, navigate ambiguity, and quickly establish credibility among technical peers
• Specific areas of technical experience; JAVA/J2EE (Springs / Hibernate/Angular JS), Unix Shell Scripting, Oracle PL/SQL, File Gateway, Eclipsev19.0.1., API MuleSoft / Microservices, Elastic search engines, Message Queues, Kafka, IBM B2Bi, IBM Portal, WAS Administration, Business / Functional knowledge of Global Corporate Banking payment schemes 
• Experience with Database technologies (examples Oracle, DB2 and PL/SQL ) queries to support incident resolution.
• Knowledge of event and schedule batch processes
• Experience of handling various production support roles (technical – L1/L2/L3) and experience in using at least 2-3 widely used monitoring / scheduling tools
• Ability to be part of IT production support team providing front-line technical support to end users responding to issues related to Incident / Problems, Release/Deployment, Operational Readiness, Application Monitoring & Production Governance
• Experience with: troubleshooting, assessing, research, and resolution using advanced query, programming skills, conduct root cause evaluation, and identify mitigations/risk, real-time restoration, triaging of issues impacting technical services (application/infrastructure) to bank customers and partners in a timely manner while keeping partners advised of significant progress or obstacles during the restoration period
• Ability to work closely with Technology Infrastructure, Development & Testing Teams in supporting Integrated releases, software/hardware upgrades, server upgrades.
• Ability to assess initial severity, gather impacts, engage necessary supporting teams, and escalate as necessary to ensure timely restoration
• Experience with on call support for triaging problems, coordinating with various support teams across the organization and carryout activities related to incident and problems
• Ability to communicate with all lines of business on the overall status and health of the application, contribute to automation, causal assessment, develop shared/common solutions, and identifying cross-functional or technical issues
• Excellent communication skills
• Working on some weekends and bank holidays as part of a 5 day week shift pattern

Skills that will help:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Consider experience with software development in one or more programming languages.
• Considerable experience in projects, designing, evaluating, and troubleshooting distributed systems

Benefits of working at Bank of America:

UK

• Private healthcare for you and your family plus an annual health screen to help you manage your physical wellness with the option to purchase a screen for your partner
• Competitive pension plan, life assurance and group income protection cover if you become unable to work as a result of a disability or health reasons
• 20 days of back-up childcare including access to school holiday clubs and 20 days of back-up adult care per annum
• The ability to change your core benefits as well as the option of selecting a variety of flexible benefits to suit your personal circumstances including access to a wellbeing account, travel insurance, critical illness etc.
• Access to an emotional wellbeing helpline, mental health first aiders and virtual GP services.
• Access to an Employee Assistance Program for confidential support and help for everyday matters
• Ability to donate to charities of your choice directly through payroll and the bank will match your contribution
• Opportunity to access our Arts & Culture corporate membership program and receive discounted entry to some of the UK’s most iconic cultural institutions and exhibitions.
• Opportunity to give back to your community, develop new skills and work with new groups of people by volunteering in your local community.

Bank of America:

Good conduct and sound judgment is crucial to our long term success. It’s important that all employees in the organisation understand the expected standards of conduct and how we manage conduct risk. Individual accountability and an ownership mind-set are the cornerstones of our Code of Conduct and are at the heart of managing risk well.

We are an equal opportunities employer and ensure that no applicant is subject to less favourable treatment on the grounds of sex, gender identity or gender reassignment, marital or civil partner status, race, religion or belief, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origins, age, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, socio-economic background, responsibility for dependants or physical or mental disability. The Bank selects candidates for interview based on their skills, qualifications and experience.

We strive to ensure that our recruitment processes are accessible for all candidates and encourage any candidates to tell us about any adjustment requirements.