Sr. Lead, Software Engineering

Northern Trust • Chicago, IL

8d • $114,500 - $194,700

About The Position

The Senior Lead Software Engineer provides hands-on technical leadership across the design, development, modernization, and delivery of digital solutions for Northern Trust’s Client Onboarding & Enrollments portfolio. The role combines software engineering expertise with architecture influence, cloud engineering, DevOps, AI-assisted development, and team enablement. Working with Product, Architecture, Engineering, QA, SRE, business stakeholders, and other teams, the Senior Lead helps deliver secure, scalable, resilient, and high-performing digital products that meet enterprise architecture, security, risk, and governance requirements.

The position leads technical design and architecture reviews, guides modernization and cloud-native development, and promotes engineering standards such as clean code, reusable patterns, TDD, contract-first development, automated testing, and reliable CI/CD. It also mentors engineers, influences technology decisions across teams, and helps address complex stability, performance, security, and operational challenges. The role supports responsible use of AI-assisted engineering tools and collaborates with globally distributed teams across North America, EMEA, and India.

Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without current or future employment-based visa sponsorship. Northern Trust describes its work culture as flexible and collaborative and is committed to an inclusive workplace and community service.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience, including significant hands-on development and technical leadership.
• Deep expertise in Java/JEE, Spring Boot, REST APIs, microservices, and enterprise application development.
• Strong experience designing and developing cloud-native solutions on Microsoft Azure.
• Strong experience with Oracle, SQL, Elasticsearch, MQ/Solace, and enterprise integration technologies.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, API design, event-driven architecture, data modeling, and application performance optimization.
• Strong experience with CI/CD, DevOps, automated testing, and modern software delivery practices.
• Practical experience with Test-Driven Development (TDD) and spec-driven or contract-first development.
• Experience with Linux, networking, cloud infrastructure, monitoring, observability, and application security.
• Understanding of application and cloud architecture, security, scalability, availability, and resiliency principles.
• Proven ability to provide hands-on technical leadership across complex engineering initiatives.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and improve engineering practices across teams.
• Ability to lead and influence technology decisions without direct reporting authority.
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, design, and problem-solving capabilities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain architecture and engineering decisions to technical and business stakeholders.
• Ability to work in complex, fast-paced, globally distributed enterprise environments.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• At least 8 years of software engineering experience, including experience leading complex application development initiatives.
• Experience working within Agile product and engineering organizations.
• Experience delivering enterprise-grade systems in regulated environments.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with digital products, workflow automation, transaction processing, client onboarding, or financial services platforms.
• Microsoft Azure certification, particularly an Azure architecture or development certification.
• Experience with AI-assisted software development and engineering productivity tools.
• Experience with large-scale application modernization and cloud migration.
• Experience designing highly available distributed and event-driven systems.
• Experience establishing reusable engineering patterns, frameworks, or platform capabilities across multiple teams.
• Experience operating mission-critical applications in highly regulated enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, implementation, and modernization of complex enterprise digital solutions.
• Remain hands-on with Java/JEE, Spring Boot, REST APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, and modern web applications.
• Provide technical direction across applications, components, and engineering teams.
• Lead technical design and architecture reviews for scalability, security, performance, resiliency, and maintainability.
• Promote clean-code practices, reusable engineering patterns, TDD, and spec-driven or contract-first development.
• Conduct and guide code reviews, technical deep dives, proof-of-concepts, and resolution of complex engineering challenges.
• Partner with architects and senior engineers to define and improve engineering standards and reference patterns.
• Design and deliver cloud-native solutions using Microsoft Azure, including technical leadership across compute, networking, storage, integration, security, and cloud database capabilities.
• Drive modernization of legacy applications and services toward scalable, API-first, event-driven, cloud-native architectures.
• Provide technical guidance on data architecture, integration patterns, Oracle/SQL, Elasticsearch, MQ/Solace, and related enterprise technologies.
• Champion Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, automated testing, and infrastructure automation practices.
• Drive TDD and automation across unit, integration, regression, and system testing.
• Strengthen CI/CD pipelines and release practices to improve reliability, quality, and delivery velocity.
• Partner with DevOps and SRE teams on monitoring, logging, alerting, dashboarding, incident response, and production readiness.
• Identify recurring operational issues and drive improvements that reduce technical debt and improve application stability.
• Champion responsible adoption of AI-assisted software engineering tools and practices, including opportunities in development, automation, code generation, testing, documentation, and productivity.
• Establish controls and practices that pair AI-assisted development with code review, testing, security, and governance.
• Mentor and develop engineers in design, coding, testing, cloud engineering, DevOps, and production support.
• Provide technical guidance to Lead and Senior Software Engineers and promote engineering ownership and accountability.
• Foster engineering excellence, continuous learning, innovation, and continuous improvement.
• Lead by influence across engineering teams and promote alignment on technology decisions, standards, and strategic priorities.
• Promote reusable engineering capabilities and patterns across the portfolio.
• Monitor application and platform health and lead resolution of complex stability, performance, scalability, and resiliency issues.
• Identify, assess, and mitigate technology, operational, security, and engineering risks; address vulnerabilities, technical debt, and production risks.
• Ensure solutions comply with architecture standards, security policies, technology controls, regulatory expectations, and governance requirements.
• Partner with Product, Business, Architecture, QA, SRE, Security, Infrastructure, and other technology teams.
• Translate business requirements and strategic priorities into technical solutions and engineering roadmaps.
• Communicate complex technology decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders and influence technology direction with expertise and data-driven recommendations.
• Collaborate with globally distributed teams across North America, EMEA, and India.
• Identify dependencies, constraints, risks, and opportunities and recommend pragmatic solutions.

Benefits

• Retirement benefits, including a 401(k) and pension.
• Health and welfare benefits, including medical, dental, vision, spending accounts, and disability benefits.
• Paid time off.
• Parental and caregiver leave.
• Life and accident insurance.
• 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