Principal, SRE

Northern Trust • Chicago, IL

6d • Hybrid

About The Position

Northern Trust 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.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience , with 5+ years in site reliability, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering role.
• Experience contributing to and evolving reliable, scalable system architectures , including availability, resiliency, and fault‑tolerance patterns.
• Proven ability to translate architectural standards into practical implementations in partnership with engineering and operations teams.
• Experience across cloud and on‑prem environments , with an architectural focus on consistency, observability, and operational maturity.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, networking, and modern application architectures.
• Hands‑on experience with observability solutions , including contributing to and applying standards for metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
• Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language (e.g., Python, C#, Java), with the ability to contribute code and guide implementation.
• Proficiency with at least one IaC or Configuration Management language (e.g., Terraform, Bicep / ARM, Chef, Puppet, Ansible), with the ability to contribute code and guide implementation.
• Experience delivering Infrastructure as Code and application deployment automation through CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to articulate architectural trade‑offs and reliability strategies to diverse stakeholders.
• 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 (no sponsorship is available for H-1B, L-1, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, F-1, J-1, OPT, CPT or any other employment-based visa).

Responsibilities

• 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 reliability and resiliency efforts with overarching business goals.

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: Principal