Engineering Excellence at ING: Balance Autonomy with Standardization

ING is committed to empowering its engineers to maximize their impact and create more value for customers. To achieve this, ING continuously seeks innovative ways to accelerate development and enhance productivity.

By making teams smaller and strengthening relationships with product counterparts, ING has fostered numerous successful projects. However, this autonomy has also led to fragmentation, increased architectural complexity, and cost growth, challenging reliability, and productivity.

To address these issues, some teams autonomously implemented uniform and streamlined pipelines, which quickly saw explosive organic growth across the organization. ING is now scaling its engineering capabilities by standardizing build and deploy pipelines, reducing complexity, and improving the developer experience. This initiative aims to embed conformity, security, and resilience by design, leading to better documentation, architecture decisions, and quality definitions.

Embedding a feedback control plane within the platform helps minimize the impact of unavoidable failures more effectively than root cause analysis alone. This approach ensures a faster, more reliable path to production. Automating compliance checks and risk controls in the regulated banking industry keeps ING secure while leaving its engineers to do their thing.

Within ING we create an engineering experience that supports freedom, creativity and productivity for engineers within well-contained guardrails, enabling engineers to excel at creating value and innovating daily. The true power of engineering lies not in the tools themselves but in the impact they make.

Join Daniele Tonella to learn how ING's engineering efforts are paving the way for future success.