Engineering Lead - Observability Engineering

Tribe SRE and Engineering Excellence is a tribe within Engineering and Reliability enabling ING to enhance reliability, quality and efficiency in the Software Development Life Cycle through practices and tools, which are embedded in the One Engineering System. SRE and Engineering Excellence drives a culture of engineering excellence - grow craftsmanship, be a magnet to attract and retain engineering talent and enable engineers to solve business problems.

The team

The Observability Engineering team, ensures observability through standardising engineering practices and tool integration creating transparent observable systems based on their internal state. This transparency enables teams to respond promptly to prevent incidents and minimize MTTR if an incident occurs. Observability Engineering ensures systems operate smoothly and efficiently, minimizing downtime and performance issues through proactive monitoring, anomaly detection, and capacity management. Additionally, it ensures effective capacity planning building on capacity management and forecasting practices and provides valuable insights that inform strategic decisions and optimize operations with comprehensive metrics, logs and traces

Roles and responsibilities
Develops, innovates, matures & implements the Observability practices and related processes across ING, in cooperation with the entity-level SRE teams and Observability Platform team with the overall purpose to improve reliability of our critical IT & business services. Ensures proper documentation, training material and other ways to get the knowledge to our engineers across ING. Initial focus will be maturing ING’s observability strategy & ensure implementation of best practices across ING.

• Operate in strong cooperation with involved Enterprise Architects, entity SREs & engineers and the Observability Platform engineering team

• Focus will be on observability of our critical business services (critical chains/global services with biggest availability issues- getting everything in place from availability of the critical service, chain monitoring/tracing to monitoring & alerting for critical components/applications)

• Supporting in shaping the observability landscape: Define and execute the long-term observability roadmap with stakeholders like architects and leadership, aligning with the ING’s objectives for system reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency

• Driving observability improvements to improve application observability by working with the observability architect(s) and enabling visibility into complex distributed systems through improved observability

• Cross-Functional Leadership: Working closely with observability platform, local SRE teams, and application teams to embed observability into every layer of system design and development

• Maturing Observability landscape: Support the stream aligned feature teams to come to the right level of observability by assessing the organizational maturity, including identifying the gaps in current delivery and needs​

• Engineering direction and Leadership: Drive the adoption of observability tools and automation across the organization

• Support in investigating, designing (incl identifying the dependencies) and help building (if needed) the observability stack with Observability platform team(s).

• Implementing SLI/SLOs: Guide the development and optimization of Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Error Budgets in partnership with Observability platform and product teams

• Incident Management Oversight: Lead efforts to improve incident detection, diagnosis, and remediation through advanced telemetry practices​

• Mentorship & Training: Act as a mentor and coach for observability engineers across organization and cross-functional teams. Promote best practices and provide training on instrumentation, metrics collection, and logging strategies

• Data-Driven Insights (AIOps): Analyse telemetry data to uncover patterns, inefficiencies, and potential points of failure, translating these insights into actionable recommendations, designing, and aid building capabilities for improving system performance.

• Advocacy of Observability Practices: Understanding and describing the whole arc of the user experience for each of the Observability solution use cases and developing practices that fit into that arc

How to succeed

We hire smart people like you for your potential. Our biggest expectation is that you’ll stay curious. Keep learning. Take on responsibility. In return, we’ll back you to develop into an even more awesome version of yourself.

• A degree in computer science or a comparable education on an academic level

• 7+ Years in software engineering / IT operations and/or software architect roles and 3+ in SRE profiles or as Observability engineer

• Knowledgeable about technology in all levels in the technology stack (from infrastructure to front-end, from CI/CD to observability tooling) with expert knowledge

• Hands-on experience on one or more levels (e.g., infrastructure & back-end development and/or observability & CI/CD tooling)

• ING Private cloud(if internal ING candidate) or public cloud (Azure or Google cloud) and related VM/container stacks & tooling; application-level technologies & tooling heavily in use at ING e.g. spring boot; Java ; Pega; Tibco; Lit-html; javascript

• Proven knowledge and expertise on Observability landscape e.g. Prometheus / ELK stack / Distributed Tracing etc.

• Preferably experience with the Open Source way of working and an advocate for Observability engineering within ING.

• You have a good understanding of Software Architecture and are an expert Site Reliability engineer with good hands on experince on Application side observability.

• Excellent team player in an international team, quality focused, service oriented, eager to learn

• You are able to discuss with your stakeholders and product owner about features and stories and can translate these into software with real business value

• Strong analytical skills to discover patterns from Observability data and post mortems and create them into actionable intelligence.

• You are able to lead and inspire a group of senior developers on subject matter.

• Excellent oral and written English skills

Rewards and benefits

We want to make sure that it’s possible for you to strike the right balance between your career and your private life. You can find out more about our employment conditions at Benefits in the Netherlands

• The benefits of working with us at ING include:

•  A salary tailored to your qualities and experience

• 24-27 vacation days depending on contract

• Pension scheme

• 13th month salary

• Individual Savings Contribution (BIS), 3.5% of your gross annual salary

• 8% Holiday payment

• Hybrid working to blend home working for focus and office working for collaboration and co-creation

• Personal growth and challenging work with endless possibilities

• An informal working environment with innovative colleagues

Stand-by shifts

Business critical systems, such as client processes, payment processes, software applications and websites, require a 24/7 accessibility and availability of several (groups) of employees to act quickly during unforeseen circumstances, such as calamities or incidents. For these (groups) of employees ING have set up a Stand-by regulation. To compensate for the inconvenience of being available at this time, a Stand-by compensation is awarded.

• If you are designated by your lead for stand-by shifts to be available for incidents outside of your regular working hours, a Stand-by compensation is awarded.

About us

With 60,000 employees and operations in approximately 40 countries, there is no shortage of opportunities for people with initiative who want to help people take a step ahead in life and in business. Do you want to work at the cutting edge of what’s possible and at the same time ensure you work with integrity and hold the customer’s interests at heart? Do you want to be surrounded by progressive, inspiring, diverse and supportive colleagues? Then there is no better place to invest your talents than at ING. Join us. Apply today.

Questions?

Contact the recruiter attached to the advertisement for more information. Want to apply directly? Please upload your CV and motivation letter by clicking the “Apply” button.

Please note, multiple interview steps involving various business stakeholders will be part of the selection process.