[JOB] Contract, good pay rate, West End London

Nik Clayton nik at ngo.org.uk
Tue Jun 26 15:44:05 BST 2007


[ I tried sending this to jobs at london.pm.org and it seems to have
   disappeared (never showed up in the web archive). ]

I'm shortly upping sticks and moving to Switzerland, which means that my
current employer needs to find someone to fill my shoes.

Perl is used as the glue here between two key technologies.

There's Autosys, which you might consider to be cron on steroids.
Locally developed Perl programs are used to maintain the Autosys job
list, which is generated by a mix of configuration data managed in XML,
and a large collection of TT templates.  As well as maintaining the
tools you get to take job definitions from other groups, and massage
them in to the local configuration format ready for deployment to dev,
UAT, and production environments.  There are ancillary tools surrounding
this too -- e.g., tools to report on the trends of job run times, assist
in prioritising job order so that reports come out on time, that sort of
thing.  Maintaining these tools, and identifying and writing new tools
as-and-when is all part of the role.

Familiarity with TT is important.  We have our own TT plugins and
filters, so you should be comfortable with that.

Then there's Murex.  This is a large financial application.  Perl is
used to script reports out of this (typically as chunks of XML), carry
out conversion to CSV, perform loads in to databases, and so on.  We
also write tools to help work around Murex bugs -- for example, we have
a tool that compares two different reports (which might only differ in
the order in which trades are extracted) to see where Murex has derived
different values for those trades, and generate HTML and Excel
presentations of those differences.

Then there's the other bits -- for example, code that takes reports (as
CSV or XML), splits it interesting ways, munges it through a few
templates, and e-mails it out.  Or code that compares job run-times
before and after various changes have been made to database filters to
see whether there's been significant benefit in the change.  And so on.

You don't necessarily need to have encountered either of these before --
I hadn't, but previous experience (esp. of Autosys) would be helpful.
You'll also need to be able to hit the ground running with (k)sh
scripting, as that's the other bit of glue in use.  You should be able
to use CVS.  Familiarity with databases (Sybase) and SQL is also needed.
You don't need to be a DBA (we have those) but you should be able to
look at a piece of SQL and work out what it does.

This is a contract role, located a few minutes walk from Green Park and
Piccadilly Circus tube stations.  The hours are 8am-6pm, and the rate is
good.  I'm well aware of the discussions on london.pm and jobs-discuss,
and I know that everyone would like to know the rate.  I'd love to
advertise it here too, but the company would rather I didn't, so I'm not
about to say so on a mailing list with a public archive.  So you'll just
have to take my word for it when I say that it's exactly what you'd
expect for contract work for a financial house.

There's an on-call component, typically one week on, one week off.  The
on call rate is a flat 1/10th of the daily rate for being on-call, and
then if you're called, everything after the first hour is 1/10th of the
daily rate per hour.  If you're called there's remote access in to the
network, at which point you can "remote desktop" to your PC and work
away.  This is also how any occasional working from home (if, say,
you've had a family emergency) is supported.

The development environment is a Windows PC, plus whatever tools you're
happy with.  In my case, that's a VMWare kubuntu image...

If I wasn't migrating southwards I'd be quite happy to stay here.  If
you can manage the hours this is a great opportunity to come in to a
small team (currently two, shortly to be one until this role is filled)
and make a difference.  It also doesn't require specialist financial
knowledge, but there are plenty of opportunities to pick that up along
the way.

Interested?  If so, get your CVs to Yvonne.Heslop at brevanhoward.com (and
definitely not to my address please).

N


More information about the london.pm mailing list