Principal, SRE

About Northern Trust As a global leader in innovative wealth management, asset servicing, asset management and banking services, Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) is proud to guide the world’s most successful individuals, families, corporations and institutions. Since 1889, we have aligned our efforts with our three guiding Principles That Endure: Service, Expertise, and Integrity. Together, they reflect the three cornerstones of business conduct which we strive to instill in our employees, whom we call partners, and to provide to our clients and the communities we serve worldwide. With more than 135 years of financial experience and over 24,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service. NT is seeking a Principal Site Reliability Architect / Engineer who sets the architectural vision and resiliency strategy for critical platforms across Northern Trust. At Northern Trust, reliability is a design-time concern. This role partners with senior technology leaders, architects, and engineering organizations to define  how reliability is designed, measured, and sustained  at enterprise scale. It is accountable for reliability architecture outcomes, ensuring that resiliency principles are embedded into system design decisions, lifecycle governance, and engineering standards - rather than relying solely on operational practices after deployment. You will influence long‑term platform evolution by defining reference architectures, architectural guardrails, and maturity models that guide multiple teams and domains toward highly resilient, observable, and operable systems. Architectural leadership in this role does not end at the whiteboard. The Principal Site Reliability Architect is expected to leave the design session able to actively participate in solution creation—validating architectural decisions through targeted implementation, pairing with engineers to shape critical components, or contributing focused code and automation where needed. This hands‑on engagement ensures architectural decisions remain actionable, technically credible, and grounded in real‑world operational realities. This role will be responsible for several key functions that both support and drive improvements to the reliability of Northern Trust’s IT Landscape.

Create and own resiliency guidelines Create, maintain, and continuously improve one or more resiliency guidelines working directly with technology management teams. Translate resiliency and reliability principles into practical, measurable guidance application teams can implement. Guide adoption and maturity of resilient software and infrastructure architectures to proactively improve our product and service landscape. Provide guidance in incident response and root cause analysis Support root cause analysis sessions by helping teams identify systemic failure modes, resiliency gaps, and contributing factors. Partner with teams to define preventive measures and guide implementation plans that reduce recurrence. Feed learnings from incidents back into standards, guidelines, and automation patterns. Build infrastructure configuration and application management automation Develop, maintain, and expand automation logic to streamline repetitive operational tasks and improve resiliency. Build and standardize infrastructure configuration management and application lifecycle management patterns to increase consistency across environments. Implement and improve monitoring and observability capabilities that help detect and address issues before they impact the business. Foster a broader community of practice Help build and sustain an SRE community of practice by collaborating to identify common improvement areas and define standards and governance. Communicate effectively with stakeholders across different teams and levels within the organization. Collaborate with product, development, and operations teams to align