Application Support Engineer — Exchange Operations

About the Role

We are looking for a skilled Application Support Engineer to join our Exchange Operations team supporting Nadex, a regulated derivatives trading exchange. You will play a critical role in ensuring the availability, stability, and performance of our production and demo trading environments. This is a hands-on role suited for someone who thrives in a fast-paced, mission-critical environment and takes ownership of operational excellence.

Key Responsibilities

• Production Support & Monitoring — Provide expert-level remote management, administration, and support for Production and Demo trading exchange environments, ensuring system availability and application stability.
• Daily Operations — Execute and monitor daily operational processing, including contract scheduling, settlement of expired contracts, and end-of-day/start-of-day procedures.
• Incident & Problem Management — Triage, troubleshoot, and drive resolution of production incidents. Follow defined escalation procedures and contribute to root cause analysis and post-incident reviews.
• Performance Tuning — Monitor application and system performance, identify bottlenecks, and implement tuning recommendations to maintain optimal exchange operations.
• Change & Release Support — Assist with version upgrades, deployments, and release validation in coordination with Development and QA teams.
• Shift Handover & Documentation — Maintain and update runbooks, SOPs, and operational documentation. Ensure seamless shift handovers with clear status communication.
• Process Improvement & Automation — Participate in the investigation, implementation, and operation of tools and scripts to automate, streamline, and continuously improve operational workflows.
• Collaboration — Work closely with Development, QA, Infrastructure, and partner teams to resolve cross-functional issues and support business-critical initiatives.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience managing or supporting mission-critical production software applications.
• Strong working knowledge of Linux server operating systems.
• Proficiency in scripting and automation — Bash and/or Python.
• Hands-on experience with SQL and relational databases.
• Demonstrated incident management and technical troubleshooting skills.
• Solid understanding of escalation procedures and SLA-driven environments.
• Excellent interpersonal, verbal, and written communication skills.
• Strong attention to detail and a proactive, ownership-driven mindset.
• Willingness to work in a 24/7 rotational shift model, including nights and weekends.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in financial services, fintech, or regulated exchange environments.
• Knowledge or experience of options and futures trading markets.
• Experience with FIX protocol and trading system applications.
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools — Grafana, Zabbix, Splunk, Logic Monitor.
• Experience with messaging and middleware systems — Kafka, AMQ, Tomcat.
• Working knowledge of high availability systems and clusters.
• Hands-on experience with AWS (EC2, CloudWatch, S3, etc.).
• Experience with change and release management processes.
• Exposure to SFTP / file transfer workflows and monitoring.