Senior Principal, Trade & Settlements

Northern Trust • Chicago, IL

3d • $164,600 - $288,000

About The Position

The Senior Principal, Trade & Settlements is the senior architecture leader accountable for defining and governing technology architecture for Settlements Modernization. The role establishes the target-state architecture, transition roadmap, and architectural guardrails for moving from a distributed settlement landscape to an integrated, scalable global settlement ecosystem. The future settlement platform is TCS BaNCS GSP, with controlled coexistence of legacy capabilities during phased market migration.

As modernization matures, the role expands to end-to-end Trade & Settlements architecture, providing direction across trade capture, routing and orchestration, core processing and books and records, market and settlement access, data, reporting, controls, and downstream integrations. The role partners across business, technology, operations, risk, security, infrastructure, data, and enterprise architecture; guides engineering execution; resolves cross-domain issues; and develops architecture talent and community practices.

The position is expected to produce a governed target architecture and migration guardrails, reduce fragmentation through reusable patterns and application dispositioning, improve resilience and control transparency, and establish a coherent multi-year technology roadmap aligned with business capabilities and market change.

Requirements

• 18+ years of extensive experience in enterprise, solution, or domain architecture for complex, regulated financial-services platforms, with substantial hands-on technology leadership experience.
• Deep knowledge of securities post-trade processing and settlement, including settlement lifecycle concepts, exceptions, reconciliations, market/depository connectivity, and global custody operating models.
• Demonstrated experience leading legacy modernization and platform transformation involving phased migration, coexistence, and application rationalization.
• Strong architecture capability across distributed systems, APIs and event-driven integration, data architecture, cloud/platform engineering, security, resilience, observability, and non-functional design.
• Ability to connect architecture choices to business outcomes, operational risk, client impact, and delivery economics, and to communicate with engineering teams through executive leadership.
• Proven ability to influence across organizational boundaries without relying solely on direct authority, and to make decisions in complex environments with competing priorities.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without needing employment-based visa sponsorship now or in the future.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with global custody, asset servicing, broker/dealer, market infrastructure, or other high-volume post-trade environments.
• Exposure to TCS BaNCS or comparable enterprise securities-processing platforms.
• Understanding of settlement market infrastructures and standards such as DTCC, CREST, and ISO 20022.
• Experience defining architecture roadmaps across large application estates and governing modernization from current state through target state.
• Strategic architecture leadership with strong engineering depth.
• Enterprise thinking and ability to optimize across domains rather than within a single application.
• Decisive, evidence-based judgment with a strong risk and control mindset.
• Clear executive communication and ability to simplify complex architecture choices.
• Strong partnership orientation, technical mentorship, and accountability for outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Own the target-state architecture for Settlements Modernization, including current-state assessment, transition states, capability decomposition, application dispositioning, and convergence roadmap.
• Provide end-to-end architecture leadership for the strategic settlement platform and ecosystem, including TCS BaNCS GSP and controlled coexistence with legacy capabilities during phased market migration.
• Translate business, operational, regulatory, resilience, and client requirements into architecture principles, reusable patterns, integration contracts, and non-functional requirements.
• Define domain boundaries and architecture across trade capture, sanctions and sufficiency checks, FX initiation, settlement processing, market/depository connectivity, reconciliation, exception management, and reporting.
• Drive simplification and rationalization of the Trade & Settlements application landscape through capability mapping, interface analysis, and application disposition decisions.
• Establish architecture governance for solution designs, APIs/events, data models, security, resilience, observability, cloud adoption, and technical debt; ensure design decisions are documented and traceable.
• Partner with product, engineering, operations, risk, information security, infrastructure, data, and enterprise architecture teams to align modernization decisions with technology and the operating model.
• Own architectural readiness for market and regulatory change, including evolving settlement cycles and depository/market infrastructure transformations.
• Guide engineering teams through modernization execution, resolve cross-domain architectural issues, identify dependencies early, and balance strategic direction with delivery risk.
• Develop architecture talent and a community of practice across Trade & Settlements, raising standards for design quality, documentation, and technical decision-making.
• Evolve into the principal architecture authority for overall Trade & Settlements, ensuring coherent architecture and investment choices across the complete trade lifecycle.

Benefits

• Retirement benefits, including 401(k) and pension.
• Medical, dental, vision, spending accounts, and disability benefits.
• Paid time off.
• Parental and caregiver leave.
• Life and accident insurance.
• Other voluntary and well-being benefits.
• Discretionary bonus program that may include an equity component.
• Flexible and collaborative work culture.
• Movement within the organization is encouraged and senior leaders are accessible.

What This Job Offers

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