Sr. Principal, DevOps

Northern Trust•Chicago, IL

About The Position

About Northern Trust: Northern Trust, a Fortune 500 company, is a globally recognized, award-winning financial institution that has been in continuous operation since 1889. Northern Trust is proud to provide innovative financial services and guidance to the world’s most successful individuals, families, and institutions by remaining true to our enduring principles of service, expertise, and integrity. With more than 130 years of financial experience and over 22,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service. We are seeking an experienced Service Delivery Leader to lead the operational excellence of our Modern Delivery Platform. This department is the backbone of our enterprise software delivery capability, owning thousand of DevOps CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code pipelines (Azure) in GitHub, and a portfolio of over 250 enterprise developer tools, UI & backend development accelerators and software products that power thousands of engineers across the organization. In this role you will be accountable for the end-to-end service delivery lifecycle across a sophisticated, multi-layered SDLC ecosystem. Our environment spans AI-driven agent orchestration, cloud-native infrastructure on Microsoft Azure, enterprise DevSecOps toolchains (GitHub, SonarQube, CxOne, WIZ), automated testing frameworks, and data governance integration through Collibra. You will ensure that every platform service meets or exceeds its SLAs, drive continuous improvement, and act as the primary interface between software platform engineering and our internal business stakeholders. The ideal candidate brings a strong blend of ITIL-grounded service management discipline and genuine technical fluency in modern cloud-native, DevSecOps, and AI-augmented delivery environments.

Requirements

Service Management Expertise: Proven track record (7+ years) in IT Service Delivery Management, with ITIL v4 Foundation certification (or higher). Demonstrable experience managing SLAs, OLAs, and KPIs in large-scale enterprise environments.
Cloud & Infrastructure Knowledge: Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Azure (compute, networking, PaaS, identity/Entra ID). Familiarity with Infrastructure-as-Code concepts, specifically Terraform, and how IaC pipelines operate at scale.
DevOps & CI/CD Fluency: Solid understanding of CI/CD principles and toolchains, particularly GitHub (repositories, Actions, Packages) and Azure DevOps. Ability to engage meaningfully with engineering teams on pipeline performance, reliability, and optimization.
DevSecOps Awareness: Understanding of shift-left security practices, including SAST (CxOne), SCA/dependency analysis, cloud security posture management (WIZ), and code quality tooling (SonarQube).
ServiceNow Proficiency: Experience leveraging ServiceNow for change management, release management, incident management, and CMDB operations in enterprise settings.
Stakeholder Management: Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills with demonstrated ability to interface effectively with senior leadership, engineering teams, security, and risk/compliance functions.
Incident & Problem Management: Strong experience leading major incident management, conducting blameless post-mortems, and driving root cause analysis to resolution.
Vendor Management: Experience managing vendor relationships, contract negotiations, and software licensing at enterprise scale (250+ tools/products).
Regulated Industry Experience: Background working in financial services, banking, or similarly regulated industries with an understanding of compliance frameworks and audit requirements.
Data-Driven Decision Making: Ability to define, track, and report on operational metrics and KPIs, using data to drive continuous improvement and executive-level reporting.

Nice To Haves

AI/ML Platform Familiarity: Exposure to AI agent orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, and LangSmith, or experience managing the delivery of AI/ML platform services in enterprise settings.
MCP Server & Agentic Architecture: Awareness of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and agentic AI architectures, particularly in Azure-hosted environments.
Collibra & Data Governance: Experience with Collibra or equivalent data governance/catalog platforms and understanding of data classification workflows and metadata integration.
Test Automation Ecosystem: Familiarity with Playwright, Pytest, JUnit, Jest, NUnit, and how automated testing integrates into CI/CD pipelines and Azure Test Plans.
Agile & SAFe Practices: Certification or experience with Agile (Scrum/Kanban) or SAFe frameworks, particularly in the context of platform/infrastructure teams.
GitHub Copilot & AI-Assisted Development: Understanding of AI-assisted coding tools like GitHub Copilot, their adoption challenges, and governance considerations.
FinOps: Experience with Azure cost management, FinOps principles, and optimizing cloud spend across large enterprise environments.
Collaboration Tooling: Deep familiarity with Confluence, Miro, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams as integrated knowledge management and collaboration ecosystems.
ITSM Automation: Experience automating ServiceNow workflows, integrating ITSM processes with CI/CD pipelines, or building self-service portals for developer experience improvement.

Responsibilities

Service Delivery & SLA Management: Own and manage service level agreements (SLAs), operational level agreements (OLAs), and key performance indicators (KPIs) across all platform engineering services, ensuring consistent delivery quality and stakeholder satisfaction.
SDLC Ecosystem Oversight: Oversee the seamless operation of our full SDLC toolchain including Azure DevOps (backlog/sprint management), GitHub (repositories, Actions workflows, Package Registry, Copilot), SonarQube (code quality), CxOne SAST and SCA (code security and dependency analysis), WIZ (cloud security posture management), and ServiceNow (change and release management).
Infrastructure & Cloud Services: Ensure the reliability and governance of Azure infrastructure as code pipelines, collaborating with infrastructure teams managing Terraform-based IaC pipelines across the enterprise.
DevSecOps Integration: Drive the integration and operational health of security scanning (CxOne SAST/SCA), cloud security (WIZ), and code quality (SonarQube) services into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring security is embedded throughout the delivery lifecycle.
Test Automation Services: Manage the delivery of automated testing services including Playwright for UI test automation, Python-based test automation, and framework support for JUnit, Jest, Pytest, and NUnit, working with Azure Test Plans for test management.
Data Governance Integration: Champion the integration with Collibra for data classification, ensuring platform services adhere to data governance policies and that metadata flows seamlessly between engineering tools and the enterprise data catalog.
Collaboration & Knowledge Management: Ensure effective utilization of collaboration platforms including Microsoft Teams (messaging, meetings, transcript management), Confluence (architecture patterns, frameworks, cookbooks), Miro (planning and architecture diagrams), and SharePoint (business, functional, and non-functional requirements documentation).
Incident & Problem Management: Lead major incident response, root cause analysis, and problem management processes across platform services. Coordinate with ServiceNow for change and release management governance.
Stakeholder Engagement: Serve as the primary point of contact for internal stakeholders, providing regular service reviews, capacity planning insights, and roadmap alignment across business units.
Continuous Improvement: Identify and drive service improvement initiatives using data-driven insights, automation opportunities, and industry best practices to enhance platform reliability, developer experience, and operational efficiency.
Vendor & License Management: Oversee vendor software license planning and budgeting, optimizing costs while ensuring compliance and continuity.
Audit and Controls: Be the face of the group for technology risk and controls, internal and externals audits, control testing. Organize the resources to support

Benefits

Northern Trust provides a comprehensive benefits package including 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, and other voluntary and well-being benefits.
Northern Trust also provides a discretionary bonus program that may include an equity component.

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