Sr Principal - Data Protection and Cyber Recovery Engineer

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.

We are looking for a Senior Data Resiliency Engineer to own the design, implementation, and assurance of our data protection and recovery capabilities across our hybrid cloud estate.  This is a high-trust, high-accountability role. Our backup infrastructure is not just an operational concern — it is a regulatory obligation, a cyber defense layer, and a core component of our operational resilience framework. You will be the subject matter expert who ensures our ability to recover is proven, not assumed, and that our posture satisfies the expectations of regulators including the FCA, PRA, and the requirements of DORA.  You will work in close partnership with Information Security, Technology Risk, Business Continuity, and SRE teams, and will interface directly with audit and regulatory processes.  What You’ll Do   Backup & Recovery Engineering   Architect, implement, and operate backup and restore solutions across on-premises data centers and cloud environments (AWS, Azure, and/or GCP), covering the full range of financial services workloads — core banking systems, trading platforms, payment processing, databases, and unstructured data.  Define, own, and continuously validate RTO and RPO targets in alignment with Important Business Service (IBS) mapping and impact tolerances as required under the PRA/FCA operational resilience framework.  Own backup policy governance — retention schedules, legal hold processes, data classification alignment, and lifecycle rules — ensuring consistency with data management and records retention obligations under GDPR and FCA COBS/SYSC requirements.  Lead a structured restore testing programs including full DR failover, Business Service recovery exercises, clean-room scenario based recovery simulations, and immutable backup integrity validation — with evidence packages suitable for regulatory review.  Own backup failure investigation and resolution end-to-end, conducting blameless post-incident reviews and feeding findings into the firm’s risk event process.  Cyber Recovery & Resilience   Design and maintain air-gapped and immutable backup tiers as a core ransomware and cyber-attack recovery capability, aligned to the firm’s Cyber Recovery Plan and wider BCBS 239 / DORA ICT resilience obligations.  Participate in adversarial recovery exercises and cyber simulation scenarios (e.g. ransomware tabletops, clean-room service restores under incident conditions) — providing technical leadership on recoverability.  Maintain alignment with NIST CSF, ISO 27001, and DORA ICT risk management requirements as they apply to backup and recovery controls.  Work with the Information Security team to ensure backup systems are hardened, access-controlled, and monitored for anomalous activity — treating backup infrastructure as a high-value target requiring its own threat model.  Maintain audit trails and cryptographic integrity verification for backup data to support forensic and regulatory investigation requirements.  Infrastructure as Code & Automation   Build and maintain all backup infrastructure using Terraform and supporting IaC tooling (Ansible, CloudFormation,