Principal Product Designer

About the Role Northern Trust is seeking a Principal Product Designer to lead strategic design efforts on our flagship wealth management platform. The role centers on shaping the design system, Storybook components, and a Figma Library to deliver a cohesive, premium experience for high-net-worth clients and their advisors. This is a full-time, hybrid position based in Chicago, IL.

What You'll Do

• Accelerate product delivery by increasing the availability of reusable, production-ready components, templates, patterns, and page frameworks.
• Improve consistency across advisor, client, prospect, and operational experiences through standardized interaction and visual patterns.
• Strengthen alignment between future-state vision, product roadmaps, and implementation through continuous Storybook enhancement.
• Reduce long-term design and technical debt created by near-term compromises.
• Increase operational efficiency by reducing duplicate component development and fragmented experience patterns across domains.
• Improve scalability by creating extensible component architectures that support future products, channels, and business capabilities.
• Increase development efficiency through better component documentation, implementation guidance, governance, and code reuse.
• Expand enterprise design system integration to ensure greater consistency across platforms, business domains, and delivery teams.
• Drive continuous accessibility maturity by remediating gaps and aligning digital experiences with evolving accessibility standards.
• Lead multidisciplinary teams, champion human-centered design, and communicate a clear design vision across partners in product, engineering, and business.
• Mentor colleagues, identify talent, and build teams with the potential to deliver measurable impact.
• Foster external inspiration by connecting design work to corporate innovation initiatives and the broader design community.

What We're Looking For

• Deep experience as a principal designer / design leader who can own complex initiatives and influence across business and technology teams.
• Ability to craft and communicate design vision and strategy, partner with leadership, and align roadmaps with design outcomes.
• Expertise in human-centered design, UI/UX best practices, and a range of design methods (e.g., information architecture, wireframing, low-fidelity sketching, prototyping).
• Proficiency with design systems and tools (Storybook, Figma) and a track record of maintaining design systems for enterprise products.
• Strong collaboration, storytelling, mentorship, and the ability to synthesize diverse inputs into a coherent point of view.
• Knowledge of accessibility standards and inclusive design.