Head of ESG Client Facing Technology

About Columbia Threadneedle Investments

About Columbia Threadneedle Investments

You'll find the promise we make to our clients is the same one we make to our employees: Your success is our priority.

Here, you'll find growth and career opportunities across all our businesses. We're intentionally built to help you succeed. Our reach is expansive with a global team of 2,000 people working together. Our expertise is diverse with more than 450 investment professionals sharing global perspectives across all major asset classes and markets. Our clients have access to a broad array of investment strategies and we have the capability to create bespoke solutions matched to clients' specific requirements.

Columbia Threadneedle is a people business and we recognise that our success is due to our talented people, who bring diversity of thought, complementary skills and capabilities. We are committed to providing an inclusive workplace that supports the diversity of our employees and reflects our broader communities and client-base. We welcome applications from returners to the industry.

We appreciate that work-life balance is an important factor for many when considering their next move so please discuss any flexible working requirements directly with your recruiter.

Job Purpose Statement

Provide thought leadership to accelerate the Front Office business and technology teams migration to Cloud solutions and digital solution. Lead, design, architect and deliver solutions and processes for data integration, digital solution, application re-platforming, client reporting and automation problems. Work across all Front Office domains including Research, Portfolio Management and Operations to ensure consistency and customer experience of our solutions, leveraging common platforms, design patterns and reference architectures.

Role Responsibilities

How you'll spend your time....Ameriprise Technology is a team of professionals who provide Technology solutions across the company. This includes corporate computing, network infrastructure solutions and security for the entire firm. Being part of our team also means partnering across the business to enable technology solutions and engaging digital experiences for clients, advisors, and employees. Our mission is to create technology that is reliable, simple, integrated and secure. We provide the tools, resources and support to help you forge a career that delivers more of what you want: recognition, rewards and work that makes a difference.

• Lead a team of business and Cloud savvy application developers to enable developer agility and access to Cloud and Enterprise digital solutions, interact regularly with Front Office development teams and business stakeholders in New York, Boston, London and Minneapolis, foster a culture of collaboration and reuse.
• Lead Cloud native application development and DevSecOps architectures and best practices. Drive cross-functional collaboration to deliver business outcomes.
• Identify and execute on opportunities to modernize investment applications and processes, improving client focused solutions and delivery of technology capabilities to support new assets, products and strategies.
• Collaborate with Architecture and Infrastructure teams to assure technological and security compatibility and compliance with the enterprise road map and best-practices.
• Take initiative to lead/contribute to overall team efforts in application development and integration, analytics and data pipelines.
• Technology enabler for business and partner to technical leads, foster a culture of collaboration and reuse. Provide cost and feasibility analysis to support and gain strategy approval.
• Deliver operational excellence through development, formal release schedules and release management processes, service level agreements (SLAs), problem resolution through system monitoring, and change management.
• Participate in the annual budget and financial planning process for assigned organization, technical assets, and related projects.
• Oversee annual asset health and security assessments and incorporate output into the development strategy.

Key Capabilities

To be successful in this role you will have....

• Bachelors degree or equivalent (4-years) in Computer Science and Engineering; or equivalent. 10+ years of relevant experience required.
• Full stack JAVA or .Net architecture and development experience, R/Python expertise.
• Knowledge of application, information, infrastructure, middleware and security architectures.
• Experience with Agile methodologies, DevOps, and CI/CD toolchain automation.
• Cloud native and microservices architecture experience.
• Exceptional skills in data analysis, analytics and systems architecture.
• Strong experience working in an AWS environment with tools and services such as Jenkins, Cloud Formation, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, Lambda, ECS, EKS, S3, Athena, Spark, Glue, etc.
• Demonstrated ability to analyse complex business/technical problems, show proper judgment and make sound technical decisions.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, ability to communicate effectively with both business and technology partners.
• Experience in migration approaches for applications moving from traditional hosted to cloud based environments.
• Ability to evaluation various re-factors, re-engineer, lift-and-shift approaches and the criteria necessary to make informed capability level decisions.
• Demonstrated ability to analyse complex business/technical problems, show proper judgment and make sound technical decisions

Desired Capabilities

If you also had this, it would be great....

• Architect, developer or other specialized certifications for Amazon AWS.
• Ability to quickly learn, understand, and work with emerging technologies, methodologies, and solutions in the Cloud/IT technology space.
• Experience with Domain Driven Design and Test Driven Development.
• Experience transforming product or software development practices to become more agile.
• Experience in any of the following: digital solutions, artificial intelligence, IoT, big data.
• Practical job experience refactoring or re-engineering applications to take advantage of cloud native capabilities including PaaS, Daas, elasticity, availability zones/HA, Lambda/Functions or other serverless constructs, and/or re-architecting traditional batch type process to cloud paradigm.