- Cycling
- Community Cleanup
- Gym Workouts
- I like trying new recipes and food trends
KENNETH GENSCH
New Hyde Park
Summary
Results-driven Site Reliability Engineer with expertise in enhancing platform availability and achieving over 90% observability for critical financial systems. Focused on delivering reliability and observability, fostering cross-functional collaboration across engineering and operations. Skilled in SLO/SLI frameworks, automation, incident response, and ensuring production readiness in regulated environments.
Overview
31
31
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Head Of WMA (Wealth Management Americas) Site Reliability Engineering
UBS
Weehawken, NJ
12.2018 - Current
- Led a cloud-centric SRE organization supporting platforms with 99.9-99.99% availability requirements.
- Oversee cloud platform reliability, operational readiness, and continuous improvement initiatives to ensure well architected, high availability solutions. Drove engineering to automate operations, manage incident responses, and ensure maximum system uptime and scalability with a focus on observability
- Drive Observability & Reliability Transformation program resulting in 80% of cloud applications using standard, extensible architecture and observability.
- Established and led Cloud Observability Center of Excellence, boosting alerting standard adoption to 85%.
- Drove Observability & Reliability Transformation program resulting in 80% of cloud applications using standard, extensible architecture and observability.
- Delivered remediation plans that reduced incident volume by 20-30% and improved SLO compliance.
- Implemented remediation plans, reducing incident volume by 20-30% while enhancing SLO compliance.
- Embedded SLO/SLI frameworks into the SDLC, improving incident response by 20%.
- Built strong collaboration across cloud engineering, development, and operations; established working groups, communities of practice and Centers of Excellence(COE) led to quicker time to market for observability solutions by 10%.
- Increased production-readiness compliance from 50% to 75%+.
- Elevated production-readiness compliance from 50% to over 75%.
- Build Analytics, Alerting & Enablement facilitating standard automated access to performance and reliability data.
- Improved alert ownership accuracy to >95% and reduced stale alerts (non actionable) by 50%.
- Built standard extensible dashboards that cut triage time by 25-40%.
- Coordinate Platform Operations & Service Transition for Cloud platforms.
- Enabled 10-20% capacity savings through analytics and advisory support.
Markets Application Support Manager, FICC Credit Trading
BANK OF AMERICA
New York, NY
10.2014 - 12.2018
- Led global team of 13 in supporting high-volume trading platforms, ensuring sub-second latency and 99.9%+ availability.
- Reduced DR recovery time by 30%, achieving 98%+ audit compliance.
- Served as primary technology operations liaison to COO, Compliance, and Risk leadership.
- Large financial institution serving nearly 70 million individual consumers, businesses, and institutional clients
Infrastructure Service Lead / Business Stream Manager
UBS
Stamford, CT
11.2010 - 10.2014
- Managed multimillion-dollar platform portfolios, identifying annual cost-optimization opportunities of 10-15% through tech refresh, capacity management, and technical debt reduction.
- Oversaw capacity management and EOL remediation, achieving 30% reduction in risk exposure year over year.
- Led cross-functional teams to drive strategic initiatives and optimize operational efficiency.
- Developed and implemented process improvements, enhancing productivity and reducing operational risk.
- Managed stakeholder relationships to ensure alignment with organizational goals and objectives.
Production Support Manager
UBS
Stamford, CT
07.2002 - 10.2010
- Directed global production support and application integration functions across Credit Derivatives, Commodities, and Global Data Services, ensuring the resilience, availability, and operational integrity of mission-critical trading, risk, and reference data platforms. Led regional and global teams responsible for meeting stringent service levels, resolving high-impact production incidents, and partnering with development, infrastructure, and business leadership to strengthen platform reliability and operational governance.
- Led cross-functional teams to enhance production support processes and improve operational efficiency.
- Developed and implemented strategies for incident management, minimizing downtime and optimizing resource allocation.
- Mentored junior staff on best practices in production support, fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Technical Director / Consultant
AVAREX PARTNERS
New York, NY
04.1998 - 06.2002
- Led technology operations and delivery for boutique consultancy, driving business growth and enhancing internal capabilities. Oversaw hiring and resource management while building core infrastructure (network, servers, internal systems) to support operational needs. Designed and developed internal web platforms. As a consultant to UBS Warburg, managed the development of middleware components for U.S. Treasury transaction processing and delivered full life-cycle development of a consolidated cash-management application.
- Led cross-functional teams to develop and implement innovative technology solutions.
- Oversaw project lifecycle management, ensuring timely delivery of key initiatives.
- Directed technical strategy alignment with business objectives to drive operational efficiency.
Independent Consultant
Chase Manhattan Bank
New York, NY
07.1995 - 04.1998
- Developed purchase and sales order tracking system for Technology Procurement organization, enhancing order management processes. Led requirements gathering, use-case analysis, object-oriented design, and database engineering. Managed installation, configuration, tuning, and optimization of Sybase environments to ensure system reliability and performance. Built solutions with PowerBuilder, Sybase, Crystal Reports, and C, contributing to streamlined reporting and data analysis.
- Led cross-functional teams to develop strategic initiatives enhancing client engagement and satisfaction.
- Analyzed market trends and client data to inform decision-making and optimize service offerings.
- Designed and implemented process improvements resulting in enhanced operational efficiency across departments.
Education
B.S. - Computer Science, Mathematics
Hofstra University
Uniondale, NYSkills
- SLO/SLI Engineering
- Incident Response
- Observability Strategy
- Reliability Architecture Automation & Toil Reduction
- Platform Operations
- Service Transition
- Reliability automation
- Azure services
- Observability: Grafana, Prometheus, LGTM Stack, AppDynamics
- Capacity & Performance Analytics
- Azure cloud services
- Observability tools
- Database management
- Scripting languages
Certification
- AZ900-Azure Cloud Fundamentals - Microsoft
- SRE Practitioner certification, UBS
Interests
Timeline
Head Of WMA (Wealth Management Americas) Site Reliability Engineering
UBS
12.2018 - Current
Markets Application Support Manager, FICC Credit Trading
BANK OF AMERICA
10.2014 - 12.2018
Infrastructure Service Lead / Business Stream Manager
UBS
11.2010 - 10.2014
Production Support Manager
UBS
07.2002 - 10.2010
Technical Director / Consultant
AVAREX PARTNERS
04.1998 - 06.2002
Independent Consultant
Chase Manhattan Bank
07.1995 - 04.1998
B.S. - Computer Science, Mathematics
Hofstra University