Mercuria is a major player in the Physical and Financial Global Commodity markets, with major trading centres in London, Geneva, Houston, Singapore, Shanghai and Beijing. We actively trade in all the major commodity asset classes, from Crude and Refined oil products to power & gas, coal and emissions, through to freight, metals, and agricultural products.
We operate a global diversified technology team across key hubs such as Geneva, London, Houston and Singapore, while operating in close partnership with some strategic co-development centres in Bucharest, Bangalore and Hyderabad. All running an Agile delivery model in unison with our business partners to deliver multi-asset-class commodity systems, with a focus on automation, user experience, innovation and control.
The Role
This is a great opportunity to join one of the largest integrated energy and commodity trading companies in the world.
We are looking for an experienced technologist, based in Houston, to lead Application Support across North American operations. The successful candidate will lead all Application Support team members in North America and manage the end-to-end service delivery for the trading, risk and operations applications supported from the region.
The role covers the full application estate across the Front Office, ICTS CTRM, Endur CTRM and Mercuria Apps portfolios
The successful candidate is a hands-on lead technologist with experience in the Commodities industry, adept at leading and developing support teams, partnering with end-users to log and analyze issues, provide tactical/strategic solutions and ultimately deliver tangible business value & benefit.
This role will report to the Head of Post Trade Technology - Americas, working on different business systems critical for the trading life cycle.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead Application Support for the Front Office, ICTS CTRM, Endur CTRM, and Mercuria Apps portfolios in North America — full day-to-day accountability for service, team, and application estate, directing all regional support staff.
- Manage the regional shift/on-call Rota (US trading hours, month-end/year-end, weekend releases, holidays) and operate a follow-the-sun model with Geneva, London, Singapore, and the Bucharest/Bangalore/Hyderabad co-development centers, ensuring clean handovers.
- Own incident, problem, request, and change management for the region — meet SLAs, drive root cause analysis, and implement permanent fixes.
- Support CTRM systems (all modules, upstream/downstream) for intraday and EOD activities; Front Office trading applications for Traders, Schedulers, and Direct Market Access (DMA) users including client on/offboarding; and time-critical NA Power & Gas scheduling/nomination applications and their market deadlines.
- Ensure time-critical batch jobs run, taking corrective action (root cause analysis, curve fixes, deal/portfolio exclusions) as needed.
- Own release readiness, UAT, and operational delivery for weekly production releases and new features; proactively monitor application availability and drive improvements in monitoring/alerting/observability.
- Establish and implement support policies and procedures; monitor queues and conduct quality control to reduce errors.
- Report regional team KPIs and service metrics to the Head of Post Trade Technology – Americas; drive process, automation, or development initiatives to reduce recurring issues.
- Manage vendor escalations, patching, upgrades, and change notifications; log/prioritize tickets in ServiceNow and escalate to 3rd-level support as needed.
- Ensure compliance with change control, audit, disaster recovery, and business continuity requirements.
- Support regional growth initiatives (new desks, commodities, acquisitions, migrations), building in supportability from day one.
Technical Expertise
- 12+ years in IT, including 5+ years supporting CTRM/ETRM systems in energy/commodity trading, and 5+ years managing application support/technical teams across multiple locations and time zones.
- Strong knowledge of physical & financial trade lifecycle across commodities (Crude, Refined Products, NGLs, Power & Gas, Metals, Ags, Coal, Environmental). CTRM systems knowledge required; hands-on ION Endur and/or Amphora Symphony/ICTS a strong advantage.
- Knowledge of NA Gas & Power markets (ERCOT, PJM, MISO, CAISO, SPP, AESO), e-Tagging, OATI/NAESB platforms and pipeline nominations/scheduling, is a strong advantage; familiarity with DMA platforms (Trayport, ICE, CME, TT) also valued.
- Strong SQL Server skills (queries/stored procedures); Oracle/PL-SQL a plus. Scripting/programming in Java, .NET, Python, or PowerShell for diagnostics and automation.
- Familiarity with web app servers (WildFly/JBoss), middleware (Kafka, RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ), and batch schedulers (Autosys, Control-M) is an advantage, as is exposure to Azure/AWS and modern monitoring tools.
- Experience with deployment, configuration, testing, change/release management, and ticketing systems (ServiceNow, JIRA); ITIL knowledge a plus.
Non-Technical Skills
- Proven team management and leadership at a multi-team, multi-region level, with strong organizational and stakeholder communication skills.
- Comfortable managing multiple concurrent issues/projects under pressure, with strong analytical and problem-solving ability.
- Self-motivated, adaptable, and effective communicator across geographically distributed teams.
- Flexible for shift/on-call Rota and out-of-hours software releases.