Evangelising cloud native.

What is the main purpose of your role?

To help the engineers get their features quickly into production and to the customers. The idea is to have everything run smoothly and that risks are taken care of. Smooth also means in an automated way so that they don’t have too much manual work.

What makes you love your job at ING?

First of all, the workplace, and the people I work with. It’s a collaborative way of working. ING manages to make an international and multicultural environment work really well together. Which is not the case everywhere in my experience.

The work-life balance is just amazing. I have flexible hours, I can work from home or the office, ... And last but not least, I can work with the latest technology. Cloud native is one of my passions and I get to spend most of my time exploring it.

Can you tell us more?

We use very recent technologies like DevOps and OpenShift. Then there is cloud native to which you can contribute a lot and help drive the organisation’s journey. So it’s not like everything is built and you are just here to keep it running.

There is quite a lot that is developed by ING inhouse. You have a toolkit for software development and API’s. Like a starter pack. You have to bring new initiatives. It won’t always be easy but it will be exciting, that’s for sure.

Do you have to be a nerd or a geek to work in tech?

If you had asked me this three years back, I would have said yes. But working in tech at ING, I’ve seen so many people with different backgrounds and experiences. Some even come from completely opposite sectors to IT or banking.

One of my colleagues worked in the army for almost ten years before making the switch to IT. I never felt he had another background until he told me. Having an open mind is one of the bedrocks of tech. You have to learn all the time, so your background is not that important.

Is tech a man’s world?

I come from India where you have a lot of women in tech. So, it never occurred to me that it would be a man’s world. But I must admit that it’s different in Belgium. However, at ING they take a lot of initiatives to change that.

It doesn’t matter where you come from. You work with people from different nationalities, different cultures, … Many of us even don’t have the same first language. But still, we can communicate and work together without any issues. Same goes for gender.

Is tech just about building new features?

Of course features are cool. We are passionate about what we build. But we are not just building something that makes us happy. At the end of the day, we are working to make our customers happy. So that they come back to us, again and again.

And we also care about what’s going on around us. I take part in initiatives and training about sustainability for example. On how each of us can help reduce the footprint of the entire company. Even with little things like shutting down your computer and screen.

Is it easy for people to learn and grow?

It all starts with your personal desire to keep evolving. And at ING you are given the time and space to learn. Because if I work eight hours a day on one thing only, I can’t explore other things. Eight out of ten things we might not even use. But those two that we do use are a net benefit of our team.

Right now we are thinking about evangelising cloud native to other people. It’s not just about us learning new things. It’s about sharing our knowledge, helping others grow and maturing them. So that they can do all these things on their own.