Traineeship: Operational Resilience

Job Description

Your team

You will be part of the Directorate Risk Management, a dynamic team of professionals responsible for developing and maintaining the financial risk management frameworks that govern the Eurosystem’s monetary policy operations and the ECB’s investment operations. Moreover, the Directorate supports the ECB in achieving operational resilience by implementing sound non-financial risk, business continuity and critical incident management practices.

In your role as trainee, you will be part of the Operational Risk and Business Continuity Section, which is currently working on several emerging risks and opportunities, including in relation to adoption of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, the response to geopolitical developments, and cyber resilience.

The ECB is an inclusive employer and we strive to reflect the diversity of the population we serve. We encourage you to apply irrespective of age, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, race, religious beliefs, sexual orientation or other characteristics.

Your role

As a trainee you will:

• be involved in tasks relating to all three of the Section’s core disciplines: operational risk, business continuity and critical incident management;
• maintain systems containing operational risk and business continuity-related information;
• be responsible for updating the external loss database, as well as data relating to the ECB-wide mass notification tool and associated alert exercises;
• monitor the news to keep abreast of external threats;
• support resilience exercises and tests;
• contribute to regular risk and control self-assessments, including preparing an enterprise risk and resilience dashboard for the ECB’s decision-making bodies and senior management;
• support other projects that may arise during the course of your traineeship.

The traineeship offers you excellent opportunities to gain hands-on experience in a team that safeguards organisational resilience and acts as a second line of defence against non-financial risk. In this role, you will interact with a range of stakeholders across the ECB and thereby strengthen your analytical and communication skills. You will be part of a multicultural team that strives for continuous innovation to make a positive impact on the lives of European citizens.

Qualifications, experience and skills

Essential:

• a bachelor’s degree or higher in operational risk management, business and/or public administration, auditing, information technology or another relevant field;
• experience of analysing data and producing reports;
• knowledge of organisational resilience, operational risk, business continuity or crisis management;
• good skills in data processing in MS Excel and in data visualisation in MS PowerPoint or Tableau;
• a good knowledge of all other products in the MS Office package;
• familiarity with Python, SQL or Visual Basic for Applications;
• an advanced (C1) command of English and an intermediate (B1) command of at least one other official language of the EU, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

Desired:

• a basic understanding of the functioning of the ECB, the European System of Central Banks and the Single Supervisory Mechanism.

You are curious and eager to learn, and want to further develop your ability to analyse complex information. You are keen to collaborate with others, pursue team goals and learn from other people’s diverse perspectives. You strive to know and anticipate stakeholder needs and will signal any need for change and propose alternative solutions.

You are motivated to contribute to the ECB’s mission, to serve the citizens of the EU as a member of a public institution and to work with colleagues from all over Europe. You are keen to be part of our team and to use your skills and competencies to achieve the aims of this position.

Working modalities

You will occasionally be expected to work at the ECB’s recovery site, which enables the ECB to maintain its business continuity capabilities.

Further information

Initial traineeship of between three and six months, with a possible extension to up to 12 months in total.

DEADLINE: 23.02.2026

About the Organization

The ECB is the central bank for Europe's single currency, the euro. The ECB’s main task is to maintain the euro's purchasing power and thus price stability in the euro area. The euro area comprises the 16 European Union countries that have introduced the euro since 1999.