Global Head of SRE and IT Resilience

The organisation

ING is a global financial institution of Dutch origin, offering retail- and commercial banking services to customers in over 40 countries. The banking landscape is changing drastically, and ING is responding in a very proactive and revolutionary way, with its Think Forward strategy. Leading, instead of responding to the future of banking and finance.

With this strategy ING aims to create a differentiating customer experience, enabled by a streamlined organization, operational excellence and an enhanced performance culture. For example, the My ING app is used by customers twice daily, on average – making it one of the top-10 apps in the Netherlands in terms of daily active usage. Last year, the app won the award for Dutch banking app with the most features and functionalities – among a landscape of highly disruptive fintech platforms.

ING’s exceptionally reliable technical platform is one of the most important base ingredients for creating these seamless customer experiences for millions of customers worldwide, now and towards the future.

The position

For ING, an exceptionally reliable technical platform is a key ingredient for creating seamless customer experiences for millions of customers worldwide. The new Global Head of SRE and IT Resilience will play a pivotal role in building out ING’s reputation as the most reliable and most innovative international consumer bank, now and towards the future.

Tasks & responsibilities

The new Global Head of SRE and IT Resilience will ensure that all of ING’s myriad platforms and applications run as reliably as possible. They will help ING maintain and build out their reputation as the most reliable and at the same time most innovative consumer bank. The main challenge is helping the organization take the much-needed next steps towards the setup of resilience patterns, practices, and way of working, making sure that all local entities are aligned with these standards. At the same time ensuring compliance with national and supranational finance authorities. The Global Head of SRE will provide the necessary expertise to define, productize, implement and continuously improve ING’s global IT processes and solutions with global process leads. They will ensure compliance with regulations and IT Risk controls are well defined and documented, and will support their implementation.

With the growing importance of reliability in ING’s strategy, this team will need to grow in terms of FTE as well as in terms of knowledge and skills. Therefore, the Global Head of SRE will build a team of around 30 SREs, and steer two managers to further guide and lead these highly skilled professionals. Next to the wider community of 200+ SRE engineers around globe working in the SRE units across all countries.

The Global Head of SRE and IT Resilience hierarchically reports to the CTO ING Bank and is a member of the MTCTO. In addition they will work closely with the Chief Architects and Domain and Country CIO’s, ensuring alignment and buy-in at all levels.

This crucial role requires a person with strongly developed technical skills and at the same time highly developed organizational sensitivity and communication skills. In a highly agile and complex organization, they must be able to inspire and convince technical (SRE) experts and IT leaders of a specific vision and strategy for the future stability and reliability of the entire ING platform. It also means being the advocate for a broader field of stakeholders on the business side of the organization.

The sense of urgency, willingness, manpower and technical building blocks are all already present within ING. The challenge and the opportunity are to connect them to a vision and a strategy for SRE that will help ING maintain and build out its unique position as a front runner in terms of innovation and digitization in the world of banking and finance.

This role is an exciting opportunity for a person with great technical know-how and experience, to contribute to the reliability of systems that we all use and rely on daily, and which play an indispensable role in the functioning of our daily economic traffic.

Candidate profile*

• Over 10 years of experience
• With SRE, architecture or engineering management, ITIL processes
• In a context of scale, with high volume and high availability
• And in an international environment
• With strong communication skills

* Research shows that while male candidates feel confident enough to apply when they meet about 60% of the requirements, female candidates only apply when they tick every box. So if this role has your name on it, but you’re not sure about the criteria, we still want to hear from you.

Interested?

You can apply for this position by using the link below. ING is working with Top of Minds to fill this vacancy.