Principal, Enterprise Architect

About the Role The Principal Enterprise Architect defines and advances architecture for Global Engineering at Northern Trust. The role partners with executives, enterprise architects, solution architects, application development teams, platform engineering, data, security, and the business to translate strategy into target-state architectures and roadmaps.

What You'll Do

• Define enterprise architecture strategies and target-state roadmaps that provide business value while reducing complexity, technical debt, operational risk, and duplicated capabilities.
• Mediate conflicting priorities to drive optimal solutions.
• Identify and escalate duplication of effort, functional and technical redundancy, and opportunities to consolidate capabilities; govern the project portfolio and ensure adherence to enterprise standards.
• Partner with solution architects and engineers to realize the target state across Global Engineering, data, security, and platform layers.
• Identify reusable platforms, shared engineering capabilities, and opportunities to converge on standards to improve efficiency, quality, developer experience, and time to value.
• Guide strategic direction and make pragmatic decisions to optimize business value, engineering velocity, resiliency, cost, security, regulatory expectations, and risk.

What We're Looking For

• Hands-on software development experience with modern frameworks such as Java/Spring, JavaScript/ReactJS, APIs, cloud-native services, and engineering automation.
• Experience with enterprise architecture patterns, governance, capability modeling, target-state definition, and best practices.
• Hands-on experience designing and building cloud-native architectures; preference for Azure, AWS, Tanzu, and/or Kubernetes.
• Deep knowledge of API and microservice architectures.
• Experience shaping AI-enabled architecture strategies including generative AI, agentic AI, machine learning, model lifecycle management, prompt/context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and AI integration.
• Strong understanding of responsible AI, AI risk management, model governance, explainability, data privacy, security controls, regulatory considerations, and production observability for AI-enabled systems.
• Experience with API Management Platforms and Storefronts.
• Experience with Kafka, Solace, and/or MQ for messaging/event streaming.
• TOGAF and/or Zachman frameworks; ability to apply pragmatically across business, application, data, technology, security, cloud, and AI domains.
• Experience with SQL, NoSQL, data platforms, metadata, data quality, lineage, and governance; e.g., Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, data lakehouse, and cloud data services.
• Knowledge of Agile, product-oriented delivery, Github, GH Copilot, ADO Boards, Maven/Gradle, CI/CD, MLOps, LLMOps, and architecture-as-code practices.
• DevOps best practices and toolchain/pipeline automation; Azure DevOps and Atlassian Suite preferred.
• Knowledge of the financial services industry and Northern Trust's products and services.
• Understanding of Global Engineering domains, enterprise platforms, software delivery practices, developer experience, cloud enablement, integration, data, security, and operational resiliency in a large financial services environment.
• Strong knowledge of security frameworks and controls.

Nice to Have

• Experience with AI-enabled solutions integration and governance.