Andrea Scarcella - Expert IT Engineering

My name is Andrea Scarcella, from Milan, Italy and I work at Van Lanschot Kempen as an Expert IT Engineering.  My job involves designing, building, maintaining and extending software systems (as a backend developer) using the Microsoft .NET technology stack.

A typical workday
At VLK we work according to Scrum so my day begins with a Daily Standup to coordinate with my colleagues and followed by lots of software development work.  Every now and then we have additional meetings but we try to be pragmatic about that. One of them is a gathering of all Devops teams to keep one another up to date about new projects and evaluate technologies. Another one is a weekly talk about (mostly) technology topics either held by colleagues (developers/IT/Architects/Traders/Fund managers/HR and many more) or by external experts. Definitely something to look forward to!

What I like most about my job
Two things, namely the mix of new development and maintenance of existing systems and my colleagues.

The first one allows on the one hand to build new systems with new technologies and on the other hand you get to learn about the business domain when maintaining existing systems. The second one is a powerful additional source of motivation, especially in this trying period. I had a very good feeling from the very beginning of the application process which extended and got even stronger when I actually started working here.

Let me tell you a bit more about a recent project I worked on
Our team worked on a project to automate submission of financial reports using gRPC services and .NET core. This involved gathering and transforming data from multiple sources and dealing with a fair amount of corner cases in the process. Other teams are now reusing and, in close collaboration with our team, extending services we built for this project. This proves our efforts to design for reusability and extensibility have been successful and that’s a very nice feeling!

A piece of advice for people thinking of applying to work for Van Lanschot Kempen
My most important piece of advice is get to know the company, ask your questions and let yourself be seen as early as possible during the process. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the journey as much I as I do and we’ll be able to welcome you soon 😊