QA & Ops Chapter Lead @ING Hubs RO

Discover ING Hubs Romania

We started out in 2015 as ING’s software development hub – a distinct entity in relation to ING Bank Romania – then steadily expanded our range to include more services and competencies. Formerly known as ING Tech, as of 2022 we provide borderless services with bank-wide capabilities under the name of ING Hubs Romania and operate from two locations: Bucharest and Cluj.

ING Hubs Romania offers 150 services in software development, data management, non-financial risk & compliance, audit and retail operations to 24 ING units worldwide, with the help of 1600 engineers, risk and operations professionals.

We enjoy a flexible way of working and a highly collaborative environment, where fair and constructive feedback is encouraged. Work ethics, honesty and knowledge sharing are key to our teams and we’re always looking for like-minded people.

Here’s a sneak peak of what our colleagues say about working within ING Hubs Romania:

At ING, technology isn't the goal, but the best way of achieving it | 84 % of our colleagues in Romania agree.

The Mission

ING’s Payment and Settlement Services (“PSS”) aims to further mature, develop and expand ING’s state of the art payments platforms and settlements services. The PSS focusses on delivering payments and settlement services, meeting the expectations of ING’s business lines and beyond, whilst ensuring the basics: safe, secure, compliant, and reliable. The PSS is an independent unit within ING’s CTO domain, reporting directly into ING’s Chief Technology Officer.

PSS is responsible for providing standardized payments and settlements services around to multiple ING business lines (WB, Retail, and others). There is a clear ambition to also look for external commercialization of our payment platforms.

PSS changes the organization towards a true Services-based organization and to deliver on ambitious promises, we have organized ourselves into a strong strategic and commercially focused organization around our nine services, where our squads working on those products are enabled by clear prioritization, accountability, and capabilities.

In 2014, ING suffered from various outages in payments processing and it was repeatedly reported by newspapers and on television. ING management started a task force to mitigate the issues. However, the real solution was born at an ING Hackathon a few months before. In just 24 hours the winning team delivered a prototype that could process payments in real-time which was far better than the batch processing used so far. The new system was named Real-Time Payments Engine which nowadays processes hundreds of millions of Loan, Savings and Payments transactions per year.

At this moment we are building the platform for Instant Payments and Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Credit Transfer payments for all European ING entities. This includes new connectivity to many account management systems and clearinghouses. Think of real-time and batch processing of high volume asynchronous, stateless communication, resilience patterns, idempotent application design and much more.

Your day to day

As Chapter Lead, you determine the way of working for individuals in a particular area of specialization and ensure personal development within that area. You will spend part of your time as a proficient engineer and the remaining with people management (including planning, coaching and review) and facilitating the development of job maturity for your entire chapter.

Even if you’ll start your day from the comfort of your home or drink your morning coffee in our office’s garden, your day will be quite similar when comes to tasks. As a Chapter Lead, you will split your time between individual contributor activities and management / people leading activities (hybrid role):

From an individual contributor point of view, together with your IT colleagues in Amsterdam, Bucharest, Manila, India you will:

• Perform incident and problem management activities, including root cause analysis to determine the actual failure cause and implement structural fixes. You communicate directly with users world wide
• Perform Functional testing and Change Management activities in order to ensure the safe deliveries from Test, to Acceptance and to Production environment
• Continuous deployment and delivery using Azure DevOps
• Improve application monitoring using the correct and agreed event alerts
• Support in performing High Availability and Disaster Recovery tests
• Implement and work with the latest tooling with a strong focus on performance, stability and security
• Find opportunities to automate the testing of existing features, performance and security as well as the automation of deployments, monitoring, and more. This is a key responsibility of the Operations Engineers.
• Help the developers/peers working for other systems to understand the root cause for a problem or existing gap for an enhancement.
• IT Risk & security controls need to be put in place and accurately documented, for this you will need to get familiar and keep up to date with the ING Information Security Management Policy.
• As part of a cross-border (Bucharest and Amsterdam) Capability Squad you work in an Agile/Scrum way, on the backlog prioritized by a Product Owner until a full end to end ownership feature team will be created in Bucharest
• Comply with all internal guidelines, timely completion all mandatory training and always safeguard the integrity and reputation of ING
• Occasional travel abroad (Amsterdam)

From a managerial / people leader point of view, you will:

• Ensure the individual development of your team members, so that they can successfully fulfill the new roles and the new processes
• Stimulate a continuous delivery culture in terms of services and working conditions
• Hands-on technical activity as member of one Squad where you provide the automation, tooling, resilience and security necessary for smooth feature delivery by your Squad.
• Work together with your Squad to help them maintain a secure, highly available, and compliant infrastructure.
• Take responsibility for the applications on Development, Test as well as Acceptance and Production environments. You automate relentlessly: Testing (Functional, Performance, Security), Deployments, and Operations (Data Center failover, Backups/Restore, Security);
• Coordinate infrastructure related operations, Incident & Change Management with SRE.
• Make sure that the OPS team is able to handle unexpected situations (OPS leaving the company, organisational changes, major incidents on our applications, etc);
• Coordinate the Risk related activities with focus on reusability (some parts of it can be shared by multiple teams);
• Facilitate the growth of the OPS community;
• Work together with other OPS Chapters and develop a new and up-to-date skill matrix for the Operational Engineers profile;
• Together with the OPS teams, create and maintain a centralized OPS Confluence space which should be used by everyone in your Area, when looking for OPS related information;
• As part of a cross-border (Amsterdam, Bucharest) Squad you work in an Agile/Scrum way, on the backlog prioritized by a Product Owner;
• You help your team develop through coaching, mentoring and constant feedback;
• Create a development plan for all the OPS (with help from the leader of the team where the OPS is working on) so that they improve their skills in areas like: Networking, Unix, Scripting, Docker, Kubernetes, etc;
• Together with your IT Area Lead you set targets for each team member;
• You are responsible for HR related activities: 1 to 1 meetings with your team members, performance management, etc.
• You work with the recruitment team to attract, onboard and retain top talent

What you’ll bring to the team

• University degree in Computer Science, Cybernetics, Informatics or equivalent;
• 4+ years’ experience as an infrastructure professional;
• You are highly knowledgeable on Red Hat operating systems and networking. You are also showing knowledge and interest in clustered environments;
• Experience with CI/CD tooling (such as: Azure Devops, Git, Sonar, Checkmarx);
• Experience with at least one virtualization - and/or containerization technologies; VMWare, Openstack, Docker, Kubernetes, Openshift;
• Ability to automate release processes and operations using e.g. Python, Shell, Ansible;
• Passion for technology, drive for continuous improvement and using your creativity to achieve this;
• Strong analytical skills, proactivity and willingness to share knowledge with others;
• Ability and agility to organize and motivate others to improve themselves;
• Very good soft skills (communicative, friendly, curious, etc)
• Very good English knowledge.
• Nice to have:
  • 2+ years of people management experience
  • Low latency infrastructural stack knowledge
  • Security and IT Risk (SOX, vulnerability management)
  • Shell scripting: Korn shell, Python, Perl
• Foreign languages: English (advanced)
• Education: Education at Bachelor/Master level with a strong analytical background, in Computer Science, Cybernetics, Software Engineering, Financial Engineering or equivalent