SRE Lead Belgium

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SRE Lead Belgium

IT Area Lead III

Tech BE / Site Reliability Engineering

Hiring Manager: Bahadir Samli

Recruiter: Turan Ozkan

Your future colleagues: MT Tech BE

A day in the life of an SRE Lead

As SRE Lead at ING Belgium, you will take end to end accountability for the reliability of some of Belgium’s most critical digital banking services. Reporting directly to the CIO of ING Belgium and functionally to the global head of Engineering & Reliability ( E&R) operating at MT level, this role sits at the intersection of technology strategy, engineering excellence and operational resilience. You will lead an SRE organisation at scale, shape the reliability agenda for Tech Belgium, and influence global engineering practices across ING — making this a high impact role for an experienced technology leader who wants to drive real, visible outcomes.

• You lead the SRE organisation in Belgium, a department of around 50 professionals including practice leads, senior experts, engineers in various fields, with end-to-end accountability for reliability outcomes.
• You define the Engineering & Reliability vision and strategy for Tech Belgium, and together with your teams translate this into a concrete, multi year improvement roadmap. Your scope spans strengthening SRE mindset and practices, improving application and platform resilience, and accelerating the adoption of AI enabled engineering capabilities.
• As the driver of reliability, you own governance on service availability and resilience, acting as the primary point of accountability towards ExCo, Tribe Leads, IT Leads and IT Area Leads (ITALs).
• You are accountable for key IT Resilience processes, including Incident, Change, Capacity and Configuration Management, IT Continuity and Well Architected Reviews, and you oversee and report monthly on the associated risk controls and outcomes.
• As the ‘chief of engineering’ for Belgium, you collaborate closely with SRE leads across other ING entities to evolve and scale shared practices, platforms and standards.

How to succeed

We hire senior leaders like you for both your experience and your potential. To succeed in this role, you combine strong engineering judgment with clear leadership, curiosity, and a bias for action. You are comfortable operating at both strategic and hands on levels, and you know how to bring people along in complex change.

In practice, this means you:

• Lead with credibility and clarity, driving reliability and engineering excellence across Tech Belgium
• Bring a deep understanding of IT and engineering in a large scale, enterprise environment, including DevOps, cloud, and resilience concepts
• Create structure and consistency in engineering and reliability practices while allowing teams the autonomy to execute
• Maintain a delivery mindset, translating strategy and improvement roadmaps into tangible outcomes
• Navigate a complex stakeholder landscape with confidence, aligning CIO, ExCo, Tribe Leads, IT Leads and global counterparts
• Lead by example, fostering a strong SRE mindset, continuous learning, and shared ownership for reliability
• You balance ambition with pragmatism, and long-term resilience with day-to-day operational excellence.

As an SRE Lead, you will have the opportunity to:

• Take on a high visibility leadership role with end-to-end accountability for the reliability of ING Belgium’s critical digital services
• Shape and implement the Engineering & Reliability vision for Tech Belgium, directly influencing service quality, stability, and productivity
• Drive meaningful impact at scale — from strengthening resilience by design to modernising engineering practices and introducing AI enabled improvements
• Act as a key sparring partner to the CIO, ExCo and senior technology leaders on availability, resilience, and operational risk
• Influence and co create global engineering practices and platforms, working closely with SRE and Engineering leaders across ING entities
• Lead and grow a diverse group of senior SRE professionals, practice leads and experts in a highly trusted, expert environment

This role offers a combination of strategic influence, technical depth, and people leadership in a business-critical domain.

The team

The SRE BE department drives reliability for all ING Belgium critical business services (including top sales and servicing journeys). Each of the teams in SRE works closely together yet focus on a specific practice. The Resilience by Design team makes the IT landscape stronger to maintain availability of service even during adverse events. 

Activities range from performing well architected reviews, embedding policies by design in our platforms in collaboration with Tech Engineering & Reliability on Group level, guiding DevOps teams to apply best practices, leading projects to embed resilience (for example: making applications more cloud native), keeping the API landscape standardised and in guardrails.

The team consists of varied experts in different fields including solution architecture, development and system engineering.

Would you like to get to know the department better? Book a coffee with the hiring manager, a team member, or the recruiter. In a second phase you could get to know the job content better via a My Job Your Job.