Staff Engineer | Engineering & Reliability @ ING Bank

Mission

As a Staff Engineer – Engineering & Reliability, you will act as a senior technical leader and trusted engineering authority for ING Romania, helping local teams adopt global digital products, engineering standards and reliability practices under the One Engineering System — 1ES umbrella.

You will be the technical bridge between the global Engineering & Reliability organization and local engineering teams, ensuring that global standards, platforms, golden paths and reliability guardrails are understood, adopted and continuously improved in the Romanian context.

Your mission is not only to solve complex technical problems, but also to shape engineering direction, influence architecture decisions, uplift engineering maturity and create scalable practices that help multiple teams build and run digital products safely, efficiently and reliably.

About the team

The Engineering & Reliability team in ING Romania is part of the global Engineering & Reliability organization, bringing together capabilities across Developer Experience, Site Reliability Engineering, IT Resilience and modern engineering practices. The team plays a key role in enabling Romanian engineering teams to build, run and continuously improve secure, scalable and highly reliable digital products.

We work closely with local and global engineering, architecture, platform, security and product teams to ensure that reliability, resilience, developer experience and delivery quality are embedded across the full software lifecycle: from design and build to run, recover and continuously improve.

Your day-to-day

• Act as a technical authority for Engineering & Reliability topics across ING Romania, supporting teams in adopting global standards, shared platforms, golden paths and reliability engineering practices.
• Drive the adoption of One Engineering System — 1ES for local digital products, helping teams leverage common pipelines, observability, developer tooling, engineering controls and platform capabilities in a consistent and scalable way.
• Serve as the link between global Engineering & Reliability and local engineering teams, translating global direction into practical local implementation patterns, while bringing local feedback and challenges back into the global conversation.
• Partner with engineering teams, architects, product owners, SREs, DevOps engineers and platform teams to improve software delivery, system reliability, resilience and operational quality.
• Define, promote and mature engineering practices that support reliability by design, including automation-first delivery, observability, CI/CD quality gates, resilience validation, recovery patterns and continuous improvement loops.
• Support the adoption of reliability practices across Critical Business Services and important digital journeys, including dependency mapping, failure mode identification, resilience pattern validation, observability correlation and proactive risk identification.
• Provide deep technical guidance during architecture reviews, engineering assessments, incident follow-ups and operational improvement initiatives.
• Help teams identify systemic reliability weaknesses and turn them into structural improvements, automation opportunities or reusable engineering patterns.
• Promote SRE principles such as error budgeting, balanced risk management, toil reduction, service ownership, reliability indicators and blameless learning.
• Drive engineering maturity across the full lifecycle: design, build, test, deploy, operate, observe, recover and improve.
• Support the evolution of observability practices from monitoring dashboards to actionable engineering insight, enabling early detection, faster diagnosis and better incident response.
• Contribute to the maturity of resilience engineering, including failure testing, chaos engineering concepts, fault injection, disaster recovery validation and continuous reliability validation.
• Influence technology choices and engineering standards across distributed systems, microservices, APIs, databases, pipelines, cloud platforms and runtime environments.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads, helping them grow their systems thinking, reliability mindset and ability to design for scale, recoverability and sustainability.
• Contribute to knowledge sharing, documentation, training material and internal enablement sessions so that engineering practices become reusable and scalable across teams.
• Bring a pragmatic engineering approach: focus on outcomes, reduce unnecessary complexity, support autonomous teams and help make the right technical trade-offs.

What you bring to the team

• Education: Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, information systems, software engineering or a related technical discipline.

Experience:

• Strong experience in software engineering, platform engineering, SRE, DevOps, solution architecture or reliability engineering roles.
• Proven experience acting as a senior technical reference point across multiple teams, products or domains.
• Strong background in designing, building or operating distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, microservices or large-scale digital products.
• Experience driving engineering practices across teams, not only delivering within a single squad.
• Experience working with global platforms, shared engineering ecosystems, common standards or centralized developer experience capabilities is a strong plus.
• Experience in regulated, high-availability or business-critical technology environments is highly valuable.

Technical skills:

• Distributed systems, scalability patterns, reliability trade-offs and failure modes.
• Cloud-native architecture, containers and orchestration platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes.
• Microservices architecture, API-driven systems, service-to-service communication, eventual consistency and fault isolation.
• CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, GitOps, pipeline-as-code and engineering quality gates.
• Developer experience platforms, shared tooling, golden paths and engineering productivity practices.
• Observability stacks, including metrics, logs, traces, alerts, service health indicators and correlation across systems.
• Reliability engineering practices such as SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, toil reduction, incident learning and continuous reliability improvement.
• Resilience engineering practices, including failure mode analysis, recovery patterns, capacity planning, performance engineering and reliability testing.
• Networking fundamentals such as TCP/IP, DNS, load balancing, service discovery and traffic routing.
• Database concepts such as replication, consistency models, SQL/NoSQL platforms, performance and high availability.
• Software development experience in Java, Kotlin, Python or similar programming languages.
• Good understanding of automation, infrastructure as code, configuration management and runtime platform operations.
• Exposure to AIOps, anomaly detection, predictive alerting or AI-enabled operational automation is a plus.

Tools and platforms:

• Kubernetes, container platforms and cloud runtime environments.
• CI/CD platforms, Azure DevOps or similar tooling.
• Observability platforms such as Prometheus, ELK, distributed tracing tools or equivalent technologies.
• Git-based workflows, pipeline-as-code and GitOps practices.
• Cloud or private cloud platforms, VM/container stacks and platform engineering tooling.
• Reliability validation, performance testing, chaos engineering or fault injection tooling.
• Developer portals, internal platforms, engineering dashboards or golden path enablement tools.

Soft skills:

• Strong systems thinking and the ability to understand complex technical ecosystems end-to-end.
• Ability to identify non-obvious failure modes and translate them into practical engineering improvements.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to engineers, architects, product teams and senior stakeholders.
• Ability to lead without authority, influence technical direction and create alignment across multiple teams.
• Strong ownership mindset, pragmatic decision-making and resilience under pressure.
• Coaching and mentoring mindset, with the ability to grow engineering maturity around you.
• Curiosity, continuous improvement attitude and willingness to challenge existing ways of working constructively.
• Balance between strategic thinking and hands-on technical depth.

What we offer

• Impactful work in a fun, inclusive and highly collaborative environment.
• Modern, open office spaces built for teamwork and creative work.
• Hybrid working model with flexibility baked in.
• Monthly benefit budget you can use your way.
• Extra paid vacation days based on total work experience.
• Continuous learning opportunities through ING Learning Centre, Udemy, Bookster, trainings and certifications.
• Internal mobility across ING worldwide, including short- and long-term international assignments.
• Opportunities to contribute to sustainability and CSR initiatives.

Job Application Safety Reminder

We’re seeing an increase in fraudulent job offers. To protect yourself, please:

• Apply only via official ING platforms. ING uses Workday as its recruitment system.
• Verify the sender’s email — it should only come from @ing.com or @myworkday.com.
• Know that ING will never request payments or banking details during the recruitment process. 

How to Apply

Click “Apply” on our careers site and submit your application through Workday.
We’re excited to meet you!

Discover ING Bank Romania

ING believes in a world where everyone should have the freedom to grow in their own way — our global tagline, “do your thing”, reflects this belief. We empower our people with autonomy and expect them to use it to create meaningful impact for customers, colleagues and the organization.

Working here means being surrounded by energetic, ambitious and supportive colleagues. We embrace curiosity, thrive on change and continuously explore better ways of doing things.

With more than 30 years of presence in Romania, ING has been a pioneer in transforming the local banking landscape, driven by technology and innovation.

ING Bank Romania is the only bank in the local top 10 that has achieved its position through organic growth, without acquiring portfolios or other banks. We serve over 1.9 million clients across Retail, SME & Mid‑Corporate and Wholesale Banking.

Join us!