Brendan Montgomery-Gair
Chicago,IL
Summary
Experienced, hands-on leader with a pragmatic and level-headed approach to decision-making and effective communication. Thrives in high-pressure trading environments while maintaining composure and focus. Meticulous and detail-oriented when approaching every aspect of the job, from coding to incident resolution to inter-communication. Demonstrated expertise in enhancing existing workflows and designing new operational processes to drive continuous improvement.
Overview
7
7
years of professional experience
Work History
Head of Site Reliability Engineering
HC Tech
01.2022 - Current
- Led team of Site Reliability Engineers operating on a 24x5 schedule to configure, deploy, monitor and resolve issues within the production trading environment, while implementing an extensive automation framework.
- Devised and implemented Full Service Ownership model of incident response which led to faster incident resolution times, blameless post-mortems and more efficient problem-solving, resulting in almost 60% YoY reduction in production trading issues
- Developed REST API to manage CRUD operations across multiple databases, as well as a wrapper for multiple 3rd party APIs (Jira, Zabbix, Grafana, PagerDuty)
- Devised and helped implement proprietary alert dashboard to centralize all alerts from internal and third-party sources, streamlining incident response procedures and enhancing overall operational efficiency.
- Implemented scheduler software (Prefect) to automate the execution of all SRE team scripts and applications
Site Reliability Engineer
HC Tech
03.2018 - 12.2021
- Oversaw and managed production and UAT environments, including configuration creation and management, software deployments, and application monitoring to ensure optimal plant performance.
- Created the Tech Ops/SRE Manual, documenting system design and configuration, proprietary and third-party tool usage, FX & Futures trading guides, and extensive FAQs to preserve the firm's technology and institutional knowledge.
- Led development of a configuration automation tool, encompassing a full-stack solution for creating feed handler, model, price recorder, and auxiliary process configuration files, as well as FIX/ITCH API sessions, all accessible through a web GUI.
- Contributed to the creation of an analytics tool, providing sales and business development teams with a web GUI to analyze FX trading counterparties, including volumes, fill ratios, markouts, and latency metrics.
Risk Analyst
HC Tech
01.2016 - 02.2018
- Monitored and assessed risk for all trading teams, covering FX, futures, and fixed income asset classes.
- Provided support in risk analysis, hedge execution, and position reconciliation to ensure effective risk management.
- Acted as primary liaison between traders, counterparties, and internal departments, helping to troubleshoot issues and drive incident resolution
- Operated firm's FX basis strategy utilizing a provided GUI to adjust point spread and inventory given the market conditions.
Education
Economics
Indiana University Bloomington
Bloomington, INSkills
Languages
- Python, Javascript, Lua
DevOps
- Jenkins, Prefect, Airflow, Salt, Ansible
Web Frameworks
- Flask, FastAPI, Django, HTML/CSS
OS
- Linux (Ubuntu, RHEL), Windows
Database
- MySQL, PostgreSQL
Timeline
Head of Site Reliability Engineering
HC Tech
01.2022 - Current
Site Reliability Engineer
HC Tech
03.2018 - 12.2021
Risk Analyst
HC Tech
01.2016 - 02.2018
Economics
Indiana University Bloomington
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