Welcome to Tag 61,

Why TAG 61?

TAG 61 is the FIX (Financial Information eXchange) tag denoting ‘Urgency.’ It embodies the production mindset where the immediate demands of today must be harmonized with the critical needs of tomorrow. Our team recognizes the importance of dynamic prioritization and resilience in the production landscape, enabling us to connect you with the most focused, precise, and driven candidates available in the market.

How we can help you

Tag 61 are dedicated to solely to helping financial services businesses find and place all levels of senior talent from both the new and old paradigms.

If you are trying to find a VP of DevOps or a Director to lead a production management team, Tag 61 can help.

Why we exist

The Journey –

“Digital Transformation” is the latest buzz phrase in the media. This is partly thanks to COVID-19, but for those in the know it is something that has been coming down the pipe for a while now, the global pandemic has just accelerated the need and raised the profile.

Digital transformation essentially means the transitioning of application layer IT services from legacy environments to cloud or cloudlike platforms.

Genuine Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) currently only really happens at the likes of Google, Amazon & Microsoft, and refers to the teams that design, build & operate the cloud platforms presented to customers. It’s a full-stack engineering role that encompasses the skillsets of infra engineering, production management & development.

Most large enterprises are on the journey to having full SRE teams but aren’t there yet, the biggest tech businesses in the world have only just got there! It’s going to take 10+ years for the finance industry to fully make the transition, so the reality is that financial institutions need to operate hybrid IT environments which will require a mix of old & new support paradigms from the old; production management and DevOps to the new; SRE.

 

Production Management

Development and Production are still organisationally segregated, production teams follow ITIL-based processes.

Candidates – should be looking for aptitude and cultural fit, balancing experience and technical skills.  From L1-3 and leveraging models such as COBIT and ITIL®

Key Skills – Communication, dynamic prioritisation, customer service, problem solving, vendor management, working flexibly.

 

DevOps

Production managers are now more closely aligned with the SDLC and integrated with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices.  Production and development partners focus on change throughput and quality.

Candidates – should still be looking for personality and breadth of experience over technical depth, but there will need to be more technical focus as support in DevOps will inevitably be pushed to do L3 support (scripting, coding, automation).

Key Skills – Communication, dynamic prioritisation, customer service, problem solving, working flexibly, SDLC tool usage, CI/CD pipeline tools, scripting, some coding.

 

SRE – Site Reliability Engineering

Development and Production (SRE) remain segregated. SREs are responsible for designing, building, maintaining and operating a homogeneous production environment, including the processes required for operations/support and the path to production for developers.

Candidates – should be looking for experienced SREs (hard) or software/infra/cloud engineers with support experience (more likely).

Key Skills – Dynamic prioritisation, problem solving, environment management, software/infra/cloud engineering, CI/CD pipeline tools, automation tools, deployment tools, monitoring tools, data collection/analysis/visualisation.

 

Global Reach

The capability to deliver globally is essential to meet the needs of our clients. We can support your growth in London, New York, Montreal, Hong Kong, Singapore, India and beyond.  By consistently market mapping, our far-reaching network allows us to partner with you internationally. Having an established network allows our highly committed team of expert consultants to be firmly focused on delivering the very optimum of talent, allowing our clients to achieve success through people. We understand that for your business to continuously grow and function efficiently, we play an essential role in identifying future employees, quickly and effectively.

Our team of specialist recruitment consultants are experts in their field. We pride ourselves in developing a deep understanding of the technologies we recruit in. We embrace our client’s individual culture, values and the broader requirements to ensure the most successful outcome every time.

Diversity is at our core

It is proven that diverse workforces not only lead to better staff retention rates but help develop a greater understanding of business needs and solutions. At TAG 61 we are committed to making a positive contribution to the industry’s efforts to increase diversity.

We aim to reflect the diversity of the changing environments of the world, providing equality and fairness for all who we directly employ and those for whom we find employment. We pledge to not discriminate on the grounds of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, physical abilities, family status, religious beliefs, or other demographics.