Ready to make an impact in a transforming environment? At Tech4Engineering, we empower 8,000+ engineers worldwide with integrated, high-quality IT services. We’re seeking a visionary Sub Area Lead; someone who inspires, connects people and ideas, and drives meaningful change with integrity and courage. If you’re ready to shape the future of engineering at Rabobank, we’d love to hear from you.

You are responsible for the Tech4Ops area

As Area Lead for Tech4Ops, you play a pivotal role in shaping Rabobank’s operational landscape for Observability and SIEM platform strategy by driving innovation and ensuring secure, resilient, and high-performing services. You lead the evolution of monitoring and security capabilities, embed best practices, and foster collaboration across squads to deliver reliable, compliant, and future-ready solutions.

Strategic governance is anchored in the Area Triangle; Area Lead, Senior Tech Lead, and Business Architect ensuring Tech4Ops fulfils its mission: Enabling squads to deliver customer value by reducing operational burdens and standardising services for availability, security insights, and performance.

By joining this area, you’ll ensure engineers and service providers have the tools, insights, and support to deliver value from day one

You & your role

You set the vision and roadmap for Tech4Ops capabilities, including monitoring, logging, auto-remediation, and operational compliance, and lead the transformation towards a ‘zero ops’ environment. By reducing cognitive load for engineers, you enable them to focus on innovation. Collaboration with squad triangles and key stakeholders ensures scalable, secure, and cost-effective solutions.

As Area Lead, you are accountable for strategic direction, team efficiency, and compliance with Rabobank’s security and risk standards. You drive the evolution of Tech4Ops platforms into an automated, resilient foundation that supports the bank’s strategic goals.

• Define and execute long-term strategy for OpenTelemetry and Observability platforms, creating a unified ecosystem for logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and advancing SIEM capabilities for security and compliance.


• Lead and align within the T4Ops triangle (Area Lead, Senior Tech Lead, Business Architect) and coach Area Triangles, Squad Triangles, and squads to drive collaboration and performance.


• Manage complex stakeholder landscapes with political sensitivity, ensuring engagement from peers to board level, and make strategic trade-offs between operational needs and long-term investments.


• Enable service onboarding and standardization, promoting Managed Standardized Services (MSS) and guiding teams through Nexa Service Store processes to improve efficiency and adoption.


• Drive operational transformation and innovation, advancing S@S/DevOps (Rabobank’s Spotify DevOps model) maturity, optimizing work item management, dashboards, portfolio oversight, and overseeing budgets for cost-effective operations.

Practical Examples

• Lead the evolution of monitoring and security capabilities, embedding best practices and fostering collaboration across squads.


• Set the vision and roadmap for Tech4Ops capabilities, including monitoring, logging, auto-remediation, and operational compliance.


• Drive operational transformation and innovation, improving work item management, team dashboards, and strategic portfolio oversight.

Facts & Figures

• 36 or 40 hours per week.


• Responsible for a span of control of approximately 80 indirect reports, and around 6 direct reports.


• 8,000+ Engineers

Key Responsibilities

Shape Rabobank’s operational landscape for Observability and SIEM platform strategy by driving innovation and ensuring secure, resilient, and high-performing services.

• Coach, guide, and support Product Owners and squads, holding HR responsibility of 6 Product Owners and fostering a culture of proactiveness, ownership, and entrepreneurship.


• Define and execute the long-term strategy for OpenTelemetry and Observability platforms, creating a unified, scalable, and intuitive ecosystem for logs, metrics, traces, and alerts.


• Within the organisation, you are a strategic partner in the Area Triangle (Area Lead, Senior Tech Lead, Business Architect), ensuring alignment with the Tribe triangle and contributing to Rabobank’s strategic objectives.

Together we achieve more than alone

We believe in the power of differences. By combining people’s unique perspectives, we become an even better bank. We are curious about what you add to our team of Tech4Ops. The approximately 80 colleagues of Tech4Ops are dedicated to minimising operational disruptions and providing advanced AIOps and security monitoring capabilities. Collaboration is our approach; as one decisive team within Rabobank.

Work on yourself & the world around you at the same time

At Rabobank, your development and that of society go hand in hand. That’s why we invest in you and work together to create a better world. We can summarise that in one sentence: "At Rabobank you work on yourself & the world around you at the same time."

This is reflected in your own development budget, our hybrid working environment, and a good work-life balance. You can work on banking matters for our private and business clients, but also on social issues such as food and energy transitions.

Why everyone is welcome at Rabobank

At Rabobank, we believe that we become stronger through people who complement each other. By embracing our differences, we bring out the best in each other. We look for this diversity in areas such as knowledge, skills, and experience but also in gender, background, and culture. We strive for diversity and the space to be yourself in every department - whoever you are. That’s what diversity and inclusion at Rabobank is all about.

You & your talent

• Experienced leader with an academic working and thinking level and 6+ years as a (Product) Lead in developer platforms, observability, and security, delivering proven results.


• Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills at senior levels, focused on people development, behavioural change, and shaping strategic IT roadmaps across tribes and areas.


• Proven leadership experience overseeing a broad span of control (approximately 80 employees, including 6 direct reports) and successfully guiding Product Owners in defining and delivering a clear Product Vision and Strategy.


• Leadership experience managing a large span of control (±180 employees, including 30 direct reports) and successfully guiding DevOps teams toward autonomy and high performance.


• Extensive knowledge of scaled Agile (e.g., Spotify Simplify @ Scale), DevOps practices, portfolio management, service onboarding and standardization (MSS), and marketing/customer success enablement.


• Market-aware and bilingual, fluent in Dutch and English, with a strong passion for software development and operations; experience in financial or regulated industries is a plus.

Competencies

• Inspirational and people-focused leader who coaches, develops talent, and communicates clearly and compellingly.


• Decisive and resilient under pressure, able to simplify complexity, create clarity, and deliver on commitments in challenging environments.


• Strategic and conceptual thinker who translates ideas into practical solutions, organizes expertise, and makes informed decisions.


• Collaborative and customer-oriented team player, eager to learn, adapt quickly, and foster strong partnerships.

Apply

To ensure that we assess all candidates equally for suitability for this position, we do not require a mandatory cover letter. Instead, we ask all candidates the same three questions to see how your profile matches the role. Please pay sufficient attention to answering these questions and explaining your answers; together with your CV, these responses form the basis for our evaluation in this round. Submitting both a CV and answers to the three questions is the minimum requirement to be considered in the selection process. A cover letter is not mandatory but may be submitted optionally.

You may draw on your work experience, volunteer work, education, private life, and so on. Use a maximum of 200 words per question and provide no more than two examples. Below are the questions:

• Can you share an example of how you defined and executed a long-term strategy for a complex platform (e.g., observability or security) while balancing short-term operational needs?


• How have you managed a large span of control and influenced senior stakeholders to drive alignment and behavioral change across multiple teams or areas?


• Describe a situation where you led a major operational transformation - what challenges did you face, and how did you ensure adoption of new ways of working (e.g., DevOps or S@S)?

You and the job application process

• Any questions about working at Rabobank and the process? Ashley Lumbantobing, IT Recruiter, ashley.lumbantobing@rabobank.nl
  


• We will hold the interviews through a video call. If you are selected for an interview, Bo, our virtual assistant, will reach out to you via SMS and email to schedule the interview.


• You can find answers to the most frequently asked questions on rabobank.jobs/en/faq
  


• A screening is part of the process.


• We respect your privacy.

To be considered for this position, you must be located in the Netherlands and have the legal right to work in the Netherlands. We are unable to consider candidates requiring relocation from another country.

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