IT Area Lead – HR Technology

You will be part of People & Hubs / Corporate Technology. People & Hubs is a global tech domain delivering solutions ranging from Corporate Technology, Enterprise Content & Automation, Workplace Services to ING Hubs Internal IT. We aim to create a superior customer experience by delivering superior employee experience and digitizing customer journeys from a content delivery perspective. By providing personal, easy, relevant, and instant services, we engage and enable our employees to make a difference for our customers.

The Area HR Technology is looking for a passionate and inspiring IT Area Lead with a strong engineering foundation, excellent people leadership skills, and a track record in scaling global HR technology platforms. You will lead the technology domain that empowers our global HR and People Services community, ensuring secure, reliable, compliant and future ready HR tech services.

Your mission is to drive synergy across all HR technology services delivered within the employee and HR journey. You will partner closely with Global HR, Central People Services, and the HR Product Families, ensuring aligned strategy, predictable delivery, and a secure and resilient IT landscape.

The team

As IT Area Lead, you will lead multiple teams working on HR applications and services, including:

• Workday & other SaaS HR solutions
• HR Data Lake engineering and data platform capabilities
• HR integrations, security, and platform services

Your teams operate across the Netherlands, Poland and India. You will lead three Team Managers, with an overall area size of approximately 50 FTE, and you are part of the MT of Corporate Technology.

Role Purpose

The IT Area Lead HR Technology acts as the technology owner and engineering leader across several HR Digital Products within the Digital People Solutions and HR Data Management Foundation product families.

You ensure a stable, secure, compliant and scalable HR tech landscape across HR domains, including:

• Workday HCM
• Recruiting & Onboarding
• Talent, Learning & Mobility
• Performance & Compensation
• Absence & Time Tracking
• HR Data Ingestion, Data Quality & Data Consumption
• HR Reporting & Analytics Data Products

You are part of the Product Family Trinity (Product Manager + Engineering Lead + Architecture Lead), jointly accountable for strategy, delivery, risk posture, and continuous improvement.

Roles & Responsibilities

As IT Area Lead, you are accountable for the stability, direction and performance of ING’s HR technology landscape. These are the areas important in your role:

Technology Leadership

• Own the IT strategy, vision and roadmap for HR digital products, ensuring scalable, standardised and compliant platforms (“design globally, enable locally”).
• Drive innovation and operational excellence (automation, integration quality, data integrity) and provide architectural direction aligned with ING Tech & Data standards.

Product Delivery & Operations

• Ensure continuity, reliability and availability of HR technology services; oversee configuration, lifecycle management, performance and incident resolution.
• Lead foundational data capabilities (ingestion pipelines, data quality, mapping and secure data product consumption) and embed security, IT risk, observability, auditability and compliance in delivery.
• Safeguard key global programmes (e.g., Workday Global Rollout) and manage the area’s IT budget and roadmap to ensure predictable, high-quality delivery.

People Leadership

• Lead, grow and empower Team Managers and engineering chapters; develop technical and AI capabilities and strengthen team performance across locations.
• Foster a culture of ownership, learning, engineering excellence and psychological safety, and act as a role model for security, compliance, engineering craftsmanship and responsible data practices.

Stakeholder Management

• Act as the primary technology counterpart to the Tribe Lead and Product Family Leadership, ensuring alignment with QBR/Obeya and Product Family ways of working.
• Build trusted relationships with HR, People Services, Compliance, Security and Data Management stakeholders, and influence key decisions on cross-family products such as the HR/Workday platform.

Financial & Portfolio Ownership

• Own and steer the area budget (Euros and FTE) and prioritise investment decisions in line with strategic objectives, regulatory needs and operational priorities.
• Improve predictability through effective portfolio tracking and change management.

How to succeed

We hire smart people like you for your potential. Our biggest expectation is that you’ll stay curious. Keep learning. Take on responsibility. In return, we’ll back you to develop into an even more awesome version of yourself.

• A strong engineering background (education and/or significant technical leadership experience).
• Experience in managing and scaling global HR platforms (e.g., Workday).
• Proven ability to handle end to end complex IT landscapes and diverse stakeholder environments.
• 5+ years of portfolio management and/or change management experience.
• Strategic decision making and problem solving skills.
• Deep understanding of HR processes across the employee lifecycle.
• Experience leading multidisciplinary teams responsible for high criticality applications.
• A mindset of openness, adaptability and continuous improvement.
• A commitment to predictable delivery, quality, secure operations and compliance.

What We Offer

• A senior leadership role shaping the future of ING’s global HR technology ecosystem.
• The chance to influence two major HR Digital Product Families with strategic impact across the bank.
• A collaborative and modern engineering environment leveraging QBR, Obeya, and product family ways of working.
• Opportunities to drive automation, innovation and data driven decision making.
• A diverse, global team with significant room for professional development.

Rewards and benefits

We want to make sure that it’s possible for you to strike the right balance between your career and your private life.

The benefits of working with us at ING include:

• 25-28 vacation days depending on contract
• Pension scheme
• 13th month salary
• 8% Holiday payment
• Hybrid working
• Personal growth and challenging work with endless possibilities
• An informal working environment with innovative colleagues