# Alan McLean

> Senior Software Engineer | Chicago Trading Company | Ex-Morgan Stanley

Location: New York, New York, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/alanmclean

Senior Software Engineer with over a decade of experience building mission-critical financial technology. Currently at Chicago Trading Company, focused on high-throughput data processing and real-time trade valuation systems for the options market.

Previously served as a Vice President at Morgan Stanley, where I led the architecture of greenfield position management systems and digital asset trading platforms. I specialize in distributed systems, Kafka-driven microservices, and automating complex workflows to drive massive operational efficiency.

Core Expertise: Java, Python, Kafka, Spring Boot, AWS, and Event-Sourcing.

Technology Qualifications:
 - 1st Class Honours in Computer Security

Financial Qualifications:
 - Series 7 (General Securities Representative Exam)
 - Series 57 (Securities Trader Representative Exam)

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer @ Chicago Trading Company
Jan 2026 – Present

### Software Engineer @ Chicago Trading Company
Jan 2023 – Present | New York, United States

### Software Engineer @ Morgan Stanley
Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | New York, United States
Software Engineer within Morgan Stanley's Listed Sales and Trading department 

- Primary engineer on a new event-sourced trading application built using Java

- Increasing system observability using OpenTelemetry to help reduce the challenges of production support issues within distributed systems

- System design analysis on existing trading systems and how to re-architect them to achieve better flexbility, scalability, and 100% uptime

### Low Touch Production Managment @ Morgan Stanley
Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | New York

### High Touch Production Management @ Morgan Stanley
Jan 2014 – Jan 2019
I currently work in Production Management ensuring the availability and stability of Morgan Stanley's Electronic Trading plant. I have a strong knowledge of the FIX protocol, and a large part of my time involves tracing orders at the FIX level through our UNIX plant. Other aspects of the role include incident and problem management, and liaising with the business to identify gaps in our trading applications. I also strive to reduce the manual effort required by myself and my team by writing scripts to automate as many of our common supports tasks as possible.

### Technology Analyst @ Morgan Stanley
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Manhattan, New York
An intense, technical graduate scheme covering a broad range of technologies and assessed by means of examinations, coursework, and a project sponsored by the business. Technologies covered ranged from infrastructure to development and included:

OO Development using C/C++, Java & C#
Programming using both Perl and Python
Unix Administration, with Shell scripting
Storage, High Availability and Virtualisation
Basic Networking & Network Services
LDAP services
Database technologies using SQL, Sybase and DB2

### Windows Engineer @ Morgan Stanley
Jan 2012 – Jan 2013
Skills mainly used: C#/WPF (using MVVM), PowerShell, SQL Server

During my time there, I developed numerous applications that helped infrastructure colleagues in there day-to-day activities one of which, was a central power management console used for for automating the powering up and down of machines on a large scale. 

I also had a large involvement in a configuration management product used to set up machines at both build time and on a day to day basis. This involved many code changes/additions, research on alternative architectures, and documentation of any of my additions to the product.


## Education
### Bachelor of Science in Computer Security
University of the West of England


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/-alanmclean
- Website: http://crackandsecure.blogspot.com/

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Source: https://flows.cv/alanmclean
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/alanmclean/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-05