Building relationships is just as important as writing code.

How did you end up in banking?

First it was by accident, then it was by choice. I got my bachelor in Computer Science in India and worked as a consultant for Barclays and CitiBank in my home country. Then in 2018 I got assigned to a project at ING in Belgium. I grew to love this industry.

Initially, I worked here as a developer, building monitoring tools for electronic banking and international payments. Later on I moved to operations in more or less the same field. It was a role where you needed to be available a lot. We had to intervene whenever systems were down.

When did you decide to join ING permanently?

After three years it was time for something new. I talked to my manager about changing domains at ING. I really wanted to stay because I love the people I’m working with. They never made me feel like an outsider, even though I was an external consultant at that time.

A lot of the ING infrastructure is moving to the cloud. I heard about this new team who needed people with experience in monitoring tools for it. Which I have. I got the job, only this time I would work directly for ING. Today I am a Site Reliability Engineer and I love it.

What do you love about it?

You get a lot of freedom in your job. There is no micro-management culture over here. As long as the work gets done, it’s fine. There’s a lot of room for personal growth too. Even if it’s outside of what you’re doing. And I made friends here with people from all over the world.

That’s because everyone is very approachable. All you have to do is start chatting and people will open up to you. Making connections and building relationships are just as important to your job as writing code for applications and software. 

How was it to move from India to a small country like Belgium?

When I first arrived in Brussels it was really cold. I also remember thinking to myself, where are all the people? That was even before the lockdowns. But I got to like the silence of the city. And at ING people are so fit. It’s quite inspiring actually. I even bought a bike to ride around the city.

I’m also running a little venture with a few friends. We were doing yoga in the park and people started asking us if we gave lessons. So we decided to start a channel called Sun Yoga Brussels. Every weekend we give free classes from 10 to 12.