Ioanna Tziouvara
There is always something ‘hot’ happening within this bank
Ioanna Tziouvara came to the Netherlands from Greece for her Master in Computer Science at TU Delft. She had already completed a Master in Electrical and Computer engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Ioanna’s first official full-time job after graduation was a software engineer at an internet systems company.
“Taking your first career steps is definitely an extremely exciting experience for every fresh graduate and it is always a time of important choices. Having put so much effort and devotion into mastering science and engineering, I was completely overwhelmed by the opportunities that lay in front of me. I chose ING – mainly because of its unlimited pool of challenges. As one of the biggest organisations in the Netherlands and the leading bank in digital transformation, ING offers a lot of potential for a person with IT talent.
Gain knowledge
I joined the Tech Class as I thought it would be the best way to start my career in such a big organisation. Eight fellow graduates from all over the world did the same that year. It was quite an exceptional class because the females outnumbered the males, which is quite rare in IT. The Tech Class takes one year, during which you work in three different teams as a starter DevOps engineer. During the year ING also makes sure that the participants gain knowledge about the financial/banking domain.
Full participation
In my first rotation, I was given the opportunity to set up the continuous delivery pipeline of a front-office system with open-source tools such as Git, Jenkins and Artifactory, and to contribute to the improvement of the team’s development cycle. The team entrusted me with the refactoring of some parts of their code too. My second rotation was in collaboration with a trader in the dealing room. My assignment there was to construct a scalable database for market data and deals, which would feed into a pricing engine for equity products. My colleagues gave me time to get acquainted with the pricing engine which was downstream of the system I developed. In my third and final rotation, I was a full member of a DevOps team for a risk reporting system built on OLAP cubes in Java. In my time there, I participated fully in their scrum ceremonies and picked up development stories from the team’s backlog.
Prioritising differently
Currently, my job is two-fold. As DevOps Engineer I’m part of a team that is building the bank’s in-house pricing tech - internally referred to as ING Pricing Architecture. IPA uses open source technologies in Java. We aim to deliver a high-performance ecosystem which processes the bank’s trades together with market data, which are fed to pricing engines applying to ING's internally developed models. In parallel I took on the more senior role of IT Chapter Lead as well, in which I’m responsible for the expansion of our team and coaching people in their jobs, making sure the DevOps Engineers have got everything they need to thrive. Besides all, the most impactful change lately in my life has in fact been becoming a mother. This new responsibility means I have to prioritise differently, but ING supports me no matter what. I already envision how the future might be. Let’s hope my son is a bit of a geek, like me, maybe we end up coding together at ING!”