Senior Lead Full Stack Developer

Northern Trust•Chicago, IL

17h

About The Position

Northern Trust, a Fortune 500 company, is a globally recognized financial institution operating since 1889, providing innovative financial services and guidance to individuals, families, and institutions. With over 130 years of experience and 22,000 partners, they serve sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service. The Senior Lead Full Stack Developer will provide hands-on technical guidance, owning the design, build, and operational stability of critical services and integrations. This role is accountable for delivering high-quality, scalable, and resilient solutions, setting engineering standards, and guiding development teams. It combines deep technical execution with leadership responsibilities, acting as the primary technical authority for Java-based services, event-driven processing, and cloud-native deployments on Azure.

Requirements

Strong expertise in Java and Spring Boot.
Hands-on experience with Kafka in production environments.
Strong REST API design and implementation experience.
Experience with Azure Cosmos DB, including performance and scalability considerations.
Experience deploying and operating services on Azure AKS.
12 plus years of software development experience in enterprise environments.
Experience building and supporting distributed, cloud-native systems.
Working knowledge on data engineering and modern data platform such as Snowflake, Databricks.
Strong understanding of production support, observability, and operational readiness.
Excellent problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills.

Nice To Haves

Experience working in regulated or high-availability environments preferred.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and development of full stack services using event driven architecture.
Own end-to-end delivery of features and technical capabilities, from design through production support.
Ensure services are reliable, observable, and operationally ready prior to release.
Design and implement backend services using Java and Spring Boot.
Build and maintain REST APIs that integrate with vended application and upstream and downstream systems.
Design and operate event-driven workflows using Kafka, including producers, consumers, retries, and error handling.
Design and manage data models and access patterns using Azure Cosmos DB.
Ensure data consistency, performance, and scalability aligned integration patterns.
Partner with data and platform teams on schema evolution and data governance requirements.
Deploy and operate services on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Contribute to containerization, Helm charts, and CI CD pipelines.
Partner with platform teams to ensure best practices around scaling, resiliency, and cost efficiency.
Act as a senior escalation point for production issues.
Lead root cause analysis and drive permanent fixes for systemic issues.
Ensure monitoring, alerting, and logging are implemented and tuned for actionable insights.
Provide technical direction and code-level guidance to engineers within the workstream.
Set expectations for code quality, testing, and engineering discipline.
Mentor senior and mid-level developers, promoting ownership and continuous improvement.
Partner closely with product owners, architects, and upstream and downstream teams.
Communicate technical risks, tradeoffs, and delivery impacts clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
Contribute to planning, dependency management, and delivery commitments.

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

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