Chapter Lead Engineer | BMG @ING Hubs Romania

About the Position

Chapter Lead Engineer | BMG @ING Hubs Romania

ING Hubs Romania offers 130 services in software development, data management, non-financial risk & compliance, audit, and retail operations to 24 ING units worldwide, with the help of over 2000 high-performing engineers, risk, and operations professionals.

Our tech capabilities remain the core of our business, with more than 1800 colleagues active in Data Management, Touchpoint Channels & Integration, Core Banking, and Global Products.

Bank Mendes Gans (BMG) is a specialized wholesale bank and a wholly owned subsidiary of ING Group, focused on delivering advanced cash management, liquidity management, and transaction banking solutions to multinational corporations around the world. BMG helps global organizations optimize working capital, centralize treasury operations, and manage complex international cash flows efficiently and securely.

Your day to day

As a Chapter Lead, you will split your time between Engineering Leadership & Delivery and People Leadership & Capability Building.

You will be responsible for leading a self-sufficient team, combining people leadership, engineering excellence, and delivery accountability to ensure the team is consistently delivering secure, resilient, and high-quality technology solutions. You and your team will be fully accountable for building and operating the owned services in production.

Additionally, as a chapter lead, you will develop engineering talent, drive operational excellence, and establish engineering standards while fostering a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, ownership, and responsible use of AI technologies. The Chapter Lead role contributes to organization-wide engineering capability growth and ensures technology delivery supports business objectives and customer value.

Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Delivery

• Delivery Leadership

  • Own end-to-end engineering delivery for assigned Agile DevOps squads, ensuring commitments are delivered predictably, securely, and with high quality.
  • Drive execution against sprint goals, milestones, roadmaps, and business priorities.
  • Remove impediments and enable effective technical decision-making.
  • Ensure delivery risks, dependencies, technical debt, and operational concerns are proactively managed.
  • Establish accountability for service reliability, operational resilience, observability, and availability.
  • Foster the Agile way of working, by supporting transparent feedback loops aimed to ensure continuous improvement.

• Production Ownership ("You Build It, You Run It")

  • Take ownership of services throughout their entire lifecycle, from development to production operations.
  • Monitor application health, investigate incidents, troubleshoot production issues, and lead root cause analysis activities.
  • Improve observability, alerting, reliability, and operational resilience of your services.
  • Participate in on-call and production support rotations where required.
  • Continuously reduce operational overhead through automation and self-healing capabilities.

• Engineering Excellence

  • Define and promote engineering standards, best practices, and modern software engineering disciplines within the team.
  • Ensure solutions meet architecture, security, risk, compliance, and operational standards.
  • Hands-on coding with a strong focus on test automation and efficiency boosting by responsible usage of AI capabilities.
  • Drive adoption of DevOps, CI/CD, test automation, observability, design-for-failure, and secure-by-design principles.
  • Foster a culture of continuous improvement through metrics-driven engineering practices.

• Technical Leadership

  • Coach engineers in solution design, system reliability, scalability, and maintainability.
  • Support architectural decision-making and technology modernization initiatives.
  • Act as escalation point for complex technical challenges.
  • Drive innovation through adoption of emerging technologies where they create measurable business value.

• AI, Automation & Productivity Leadership

  • Drive responsible adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices throughout the chapter and squads.
  • Promote AI-enabled software development, testing, documentation, operations, and knowledge management practices.
  • Ensure AI governance and quality controls for AI-generated outputs is followed in order to support compliancy, security, privacy, and regulatory requirements.
  • Build AI literacy across the engineering population, including foundational AI concepts, AI safety, prompt engineering, and critical evaluation of generated outputs.
  • Measure and continuously improve engineering productivity through automation, AI tooling, self-service capabilities, and streamlined ways of working.
  • Identify opportunities to reduce manual effort and increase delivery speed while maintaining quality and control standards.

• Risk, Governance & Resilience

  • Ensure adherence to technology governance, risk management, security, DORA, resilience, and compliance requirements.
  • Continuously improve engineering controls related to security, operational risk, resiliency, disaster recovery, and service continuity.
  • Ensure teams are audit-ready and maintain appropriate documentation and evidence of compliance.

People Leadership & Capability Building Responsibilities

• People Leadership

  • Direct manager for a team of 8-15 engineers covering full technology spectrum (backend, frontend, database, business analysis, testing)
  • Lead, coach, and develop chapter members to achieve both career and organizational goals.
  • Conduct performance management, development conversations, talent assessments, and succession planning.
  • Support employee wellbeing, engagement, inclusion, and psychological safety.
  • Create a high-performing engineering culture grounded in ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning.
  • Act as mentor and role model for engineering professionalism and leadership behaviors.

• Capability Development

  • Define chapter capability strategies aligned with business and technology objectives.
  • Build engineering capability pipelines through coaching, mentoring, knowledge sharing, and community development.
  • Drive continuous learning and professional growth across engineering disciplines.
  • Encourage certification, technical mastery, AI skills development, and participation in engineering communities.
  • Develop future technical and people leaders through stretch assignments, coaching, and leadership opportunities.

• Workforce Planning

  • Partner with Product Area Leads, IT Area Leads, Architects, and fellow Chapter Leads to ensure appropriate staffing and capability allocation.
  • Evaluate talent gaps and create long-term plans for capability growth.
  • Support recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and retention activities.
  • Participate in hiring decisions and talent selection processes within the scope of the chapter.

• Chapter & Community Leadership

  • Establish standards, practices, and ways of working for the engineering discipline.
  • Foster cross-squad collaboration and knowledge sharing.
  • Contribute to engineering communities of practice and organizational capability initiatives.
  • Promote One Way of Working adoption and continuous improvement initiatives.

• Culture & Leadership

  • Build a culture of accountability, ownership, learning, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
  • Encourage engineers to balance customer value, engineering quality, security, risk, and operational excellence.
  • Champion customer focus, engineering excellence, and responsible innovation.
  • Lead organizational change and technology transformation initiatives.

Requirements

Mandatory

• Experience

  • 10+ years of software engineering in JVM language and related technology stack
  • 2+ years of people management experience

• Tech stack/ knowledge

  • Strong engineering foundation with hands-on experience in Java 21, Spring Boot 4.x and Spring Framework suite, JPA/Hibernate, APIs (REST, gRPC, etc), UI technologies (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, accessibility, security) and UI frameworks (ideally Lit-Html or either of Angular, React, Vue, Svelte)
  • Strong knowledge of enterprise integration patterns and integration middleware (JMS, Kafka)
  • Good knowledge of relational databases (MS SQL Server or Oracle) and ability to fine tune database models and data intensive operations
  • Ability to write clean and maintainable code
  • Good knowledge of source control, CI/CD and documentation tools (Azure DevOps, Git, Maven, Confluence) and ability to define CI/CD pipelines and manage DevOps related activities during software development lifecycle
  • Have a mentality to test your code using various frameworks like Junit, Mockito or BDD testing frameworks like JGiven, Cucumber or Karate
  • Knowledge of Playwright framework for web testing and automation
  • Knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes using OpenShift as orchestration
  • Knowledge of various communication protocols like HTTP1/2, Messaging, RPCs, etc.
  • Knowledge of Domain Driven Design (DDD) and ability to design systems in this paradigm
  • Familiarity with different architecture patterns (i.e. monolith vs microservices)
  • Strong analytical skills, proactivity, and ability to work in cross-border international teams
  • Excellent Stakeholder Management skills
  • Demonstrates independent thinking and decision-making abilities, with a keen eye on quality
  • Strong interpersonal and written and verbal communication skills

Nice to Have

• Performance testing with tools like JMeter, Gatling
• Exposing meaningful metrics to have proper monitoring and alerting and ability to perform profiling to better understand the application
• Familiarity with Elastic stack and how to query logs
• Experience or affinity with IT Security concepts
• Experience with other JVM languages or other programming languages like Kotlin

Languages

• English: advanced

Education

• Completed Education at Bachelor/Master level with a strong analytical background, in Computer Science, Cybernetics, Software Engineering, Financial Engineering or equivalent

We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Opportunity to work in a dynamic and inclusive environment
• Professional growth and development opportunities
• Flexible working arrangements

About the Company

ING Hubs Romania offers 130 services in software development, data management, non-financial risk & compliance, audit, and retail operations to 24 ING units worldwide, with the help of over 2000 high-performing engineers, risk, and operations professionals.

We enjoy a flexible way of working and a highly collaborative environment, where fair and constructive feedback is encouraged.

For us, impact isn't a perk. It's the driver of our work. We are guided and rewarded by a shared desire to make the world a better place, one innovative solution at a time. Our colleagues make it their job to do impactful things and they love doing it in good company. Do you?

*If you want to deep dive into the processing of personal data conducted by ING Hubs Romania during the recruitment process and your rights related to it, read the privacy notices on our website (make sure to scroll until you reach the Data Protection section/ Candidates tab).

In ING vogliamo che le persone possano dare il meglio di sé. Per questo, creiamo una cultura inclusiva dove tutti possono crescere e fare la differenza per i nostri clienti e la società. Promuoviamo sempre diversità, uguaglianza e inclusione. Non tolleriamo nessuna forma di discriminazione: per età, genere, identità di genere, cultura, esperienza, religione, razza, disabilità, responsabilità familiari, orientamento sessuale o altro. Se hai bisogno di supporto o un aiuto durante il processo di selezione o colloquio, contatta il reclutatore indicato nell'annuncio. Saremo felici di aiutarti per rendere tutto giusto e accessibile. Clicca qui per scoprire di più sul nostro impegno per diversità e inclusione.