Information Architect

Northern Trust • Chicago, IL

22h

About The Position

Northern Trust is a global leader in wealth management, asset servicing, asset management, and banking services. With over 135 years of experience and more than 24,000 partners, they serve sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service. This role is crucial for guiding the firm's data architecture, focusing on data modeling, semantic modeling, data engineering, and leveraging AI technologies. The Information Architect will play a key role in designing and governing data structures, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards, and enabling advanced AI capabilities. The position requires a strong understanding of data architecture principles, data modeling tools, and modern data platforms like Snowflake and Databricks, with a focus on agentic AI and AI-assisted development. Collaboration with engineering, domain teams, and architecture groups is essential, as is presenting decisions to stakeholders and ensuring regulatory compliance.

Requirements

• Proven experience in data architecture, data engineering, or information management.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.
• Proven enterprise data modelling experience at conceptual, logical, and physical levels.
• Hands-on SqlDBM experience (or equivalent modern toolset).
• Proven experience with dbt Labs.
• Good Python skills, API integration, automation.
• Practical Snowflake and Databricks experience including Cortex AI and Genie.
• Working knowledge of OWL, RDF, SPARQL and enterprise ontology design.
• Experience with at least one agentic AI framework.
• GitHub Copilot or equivalent AI coding assistant experience in a professional setting.
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for employment-based visa sponsorship now or in the future.
• Northern Trust will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work visa status for this opportunity.

Nice To Haves

• Financial services background preferred.
• BCBS 239 awareness advantageous.
• Data Vault 2.1 alongside Kimball/Star-schema modelling.
• Data mesh, data product ownership and federated governance.
• Knowledge graph platforms (Neo4j, Neptune) or knowledge of OWL, RDF and exposure to and build of ontologies.
• Published thought leadership or community contributions in data or AI.

Responsibilities

• Lead and contribute to conceptual, logical, and physical data model design aligned with the firm's data mesh and medallion architectures.
• Govern and maintain the enterprise data model library in SqlDBM, enforcing naming conventions, domain standards, and versioning.
• Define and steward canonical data entities and lineage across source, integration, and consumption layers.
• Translate business requirements into rigorous data structures in collaboration with engineering and domain teams.
• Guide teams on the design and effective use of semantic data models, including their application to agentic AI solutions.
• Integrate semantic layers with business glossaries, data catalogues, and lineage tooling.
• Design and maintain semantic models to support agentic-AI capabilities.
• Develop ontologies, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies underpinning enterprise metadata and search.
• Define semantic modelling standards and patterns to ensure consistent meaning, interoperability, and AI readiness across data products.
• Guide and control the creation of data domains that align with the banks underlying capabilities.
• Design data product schemas across Snowflake and Databricks, including Delta Lake structures and access patterns.
• Define and enforce architectural guardrails for data product design, including performance, scalability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Set design standards and review transformation/pipelines for compliance.
• Embed data contract standards and data quality frameworks across pipeline outputs.
• Leverage Snowflake Cortex / Databricks Genie (or similar) to help engineering teams deliver natural language query and LLM-augmented data products.
• Utilize GitHub Copilot (or similar) to accelerate modelling, documentation, and pipeline development.
• Design and define a set of agentic skills that can be provided to implementation teams.
• Contribute to the firm's AI Champion network, evaluating emerging capabilities and advising on adoption.
• Act as a design authority for data architecture across teams and data domains.
• Partner with enterprise, security, and risk architecture to ensure data solutions align with broader technology and regulatory standards.
• Provide early-stage architectural input to initiative discovery and solution design to reduce delivery risk.
• Present architecture decisions to senior stakeholders, architecture review boards, and regulatory audiences.
• Support regulatory compliance through robust lineage, metadata management, and data quality evidence.
• Mentor junior architects and engineers within the Information Architecture community of practice.

Benefits

• Retirement benefits (401k and pension)
• Health and welfare benefits (medical, dental, vision, spending accounts and disability)
• Paid time off
• Parental and caregiver leave
• Life & accident insurance
• Other voluntary and well-being benefits
• Discretionary bonus program that may include an equity component

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior