Principal - Head of Compliance Architecture

Northern Trust; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Northern Trust is seeking a Compliance Architect to serve as the senior architecture authority across Financial Crimes, Regulatory Compliance, and Regulatory Change portfolios. The role leads target-state architecture, platform modernization, and governance across SaaS, cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premise environments.

You will drive enterprise data architecture, data governance, and analytics capabilities leveraging Snowflake and Databricks, while aligning with business strategy and regulatory

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related field.
• At least fifteen years of experience in enterprise architecture, software engineering, data architecture, or technology leadership.
• Experience delivering SaaS, cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premise solutions for financial services.

Responsibilities

• Acts as the senior architecture authority for Financial Crimes, Regulatory Compliance, and Regulatory Change portfolios.
• Defines target-state architecture, governance, and roadmaps across cloud, on-premise, and vendor platforms.
• Leads architecture due diligence for platforms, ensuring scalability, security, and total cost of ownership.
• Sets engineering standards, reference architectures, and governance for SaaS, data, and integration domains.
• Guides enterprise data architecture, governance, lineage, and analytics capabilities including Snowflake and Databricks.
• Collaborates with Product, Risk, Audit, Cyber Security, and Operations to align tech with regulatory objectives.

Skills

Enterprise architecture

Regulatory compliance

AML/KYC/Sanctions

Cloud architecture

Stakeholder leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Snowflake

Databricks

PCF/Kubernetes

Job description

As a global leader in innovative wealth management, asset servicing, asset management and banking services, Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) is proud to guide the world’s most successful individuals, families, corporations and institutions.

Since 1889, we have aligned our efforts with our three guiding Principles That Endure: Service, Expertise, and Integrity. Together, they reflect the three cornerstones of business conduct which we strive to instill in our employees, whom we call partners, and to provide to our clients and the communities we serve worldwide.

Compliance Architect serves as the senior architecture authority across Financial Crimes, Regulatory Compliance, Regulatory Change portfolios, along with expanding involvement with Legal / Audit technology portfolios. This role is accountable for establishing target-state architecture, governing technology strategy, accelerating platform modernization, and ensuring regulatory technology solutions operate as an integrated ecosystem.

The architect provides strategic leadership across SaaS, cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premise platforms; enterprise data environments; vendor solutions; engineering organizations; and compliance capabilities, ensuring technology investments deliver scalable, resilient, secure, and compliant business outcomes.

Major Duties

• Serves as the lead architecture authority for Financial Crimes, Regulatory Compliance, Regulatory Change portfolios, providing technical leadership across Anti-Money Laundering (AML), KYC, Sanctions Screening, Fraud Prevention, Ethics & Conduct, Trade Surveillance, Electronic Communications Surveillance, Regulatory Change Management, Compliance Risk Assessment, Compliance Testing, Compliance Monitoring capabilities.
• Establishes and maintains the target-state architecture vision across the portfolio, ensuring technology solutions align with regulatory obligations, business strategy, enterprise architecture standards, and long-term technology objectives.
• Develops portfolio-level architecture roadmaps and modernization strategies, identifying opportunities for capability expansion, platform rationalization, cloud adoption, technical debt reduction, cost optimization, and technology transformation.
• Defines and governs enterprise architecture principles, engineering standards, design patterns, and technology reference architectures across SaaS, cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premise environments.
• Leads evaluation and selection of strategic technology platforms and vendor solutions, performing architecture due diligence and providing recommendations regarding scalability, resiliency, security, integration complexity, supportability, and total cost of ownership.
• Establishes architecture standards and governance processes for commercial, SaaS, and internally developed solutions, ensuring consistency across application, integration, data, infrastructure, and security domains.
• Designs and governs enterprise integration patterns across critical source systems, including payment systems, trade processing platforms, client onboarding systems, sanctions screening platforms, master data management solutions, regulatory reporting systems, and operational platforms.
• Provides strategic oversight of enterprise data architecture, including data acquisition, transformation, governance, lineage, quality, analytics, reporting, and AI enablement capabilities leveraging technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, cloud data platforms, real-time streaming technologies, and enterprise data ecosystems.
• Establishes architecture standards supporting modern cloud and distributed systems including API-led architectures, event-driven integration, microservices, container platforms, cloud-native services, and platform engineering practices.
• Provides architectural leadership and governance for critical compliance technology platforms, including AML and transaction monitoring solutions, Actimize, sanctions screening platforms, fraud management solutions, ServiceNow IRM, regulatory change platforms, surveillance technologies, and audit automation capabilities.
• Drives enterprise resiliency, recoverability, and operational excellence initiatives including active-active architectures, hot-hot disaster recovery models, blue-green deployment strategies, high availability design, observability, fault tolerance, and business continuity readiness.
• Establishes and improves engineering discipline and software delivery practices, including CI/CD pipelines, DevSecOps operating models, automated testing, release governance, engineering standards, infrastructure-as-code, software lifecycle management, and technical debt governance.
• Participates in enterprise architecture review boards and design governance forums, providing technical oversight and approval for strategic initiatives, architecture exceptions, platform roadmaps, and major technology investments.
• Partners with Product Management, Compliance, Risk, Audit, Operations, Cyber Security, Infrastructure, Data Management, and Engineering organizations to ensure technology capabilities support strategic regulatory objectives and business outcomes.
• Provides leadership support to technical leads, engineering managers, and development teams, fostering architecture consistency, engineering excellence, and operational maturity across the portfolio.
• Advises executive leadership on technology strategy, emerging technologies, architecture risks, platform investment decisions, modernization opportunities, regulatory technology trends, and enterprise technology direction.
• Carries out the most complex initiatives involving multiple disciplines, technologies, regulatory requirements, and stakeholders while balancing business value, risk, cost, and operational sustainability.
• Consistently displays a balanced, cross-functional perspective, liaising with business and technology leadership to improve efficiency, effectiveness, resilience, risk management, and organizational productivity.
• Highly flexible and adaptable to organizational, regulatory, technology, and business change.

Knowledge

Requires extensive knowledge of enterprise architecture, distributed systems, cloud-native technologies, financial services technology platforms, regulatory technology ecosystems, and modern software engineering practices.

Strong expertise required in:

• Familiarity with at least 2 of the three domains:
• 1. Financial Crimes Compliance technologies including AML, KYC, Sanctions Screening, Transaction Monitoring, Fraud Prevention, and Case Management.
• 2. Regulatory Compliance capabilities including Trade Surveillance, Electronic Communications Surveillance, Ethics & Conduct, Regulatory Reporting, and Conduct Risk Management.
• 3. Regulatory Change and Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) platforms including Compliance Risk Assessment, Compliance Testing, Compliance Monitoring, Regulatory Change Management, and Audit Management.
• Enterprise architecture disciplines including application architecture, integration architecture, data architecture, infrastructure architecture, security architecture, and solution architecture.
• Cloud and hybrid technology platforms including cloud-native architectures, microservices, APIs, event-driven systems, containerization, platform engineering, and PCF/Kubernetes environments.
• Enterprise data architecture utilizing Snowflake, Databricks, data lakes, data warehouses, master data management, metadata management, AI enablement, and advanced analytics platforms.
• Enterprise resiliency, disaster recovery, active-active architectures, high availability, blue-green deployments, observability, and operational readiness frameworks.
• Modern DevSecOps and software engineering disciplines including CI/CD, automated testing, infrastructure-as-code, secure software delivery, and software lifecycle governance.
• Vendor management and architecture governance for enterprise and regulatory technology platforms.

Requires exceptional analytical ability, judgment, communication skills, executive presence, negotiation skills, and the ability to influence senior leaders across business, compliance, risk, audit, operations, and technology functions.

Experience

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline, and at least fifteen or more years of progressively responsible experience in enterprise architecture, software engineering, data architecture, or technology leadership.

Experience should include:

• Enterprise architecture leadership across multiple business domains and technology portfolios.
• Financial services, banking, regulatory, risk, compliance, audit, or financial crimes technology environments.
• Delivery and governance of SaaS, cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premise solutions.
• Enterprise data architecture, data engineering, analytics, and integration platforms.
• Vendor solution evaluation, architecture governance, and technology modernization initiatives.
• Large-scale program and portfolio transformation efforts involving multiple technologies, stakeholders, and regulatory requirements.
• Architecture leadership across geographically distributed teams and complex enterprise environments.
• Influencing executive stakeholders and driving technology strategy at the portfolio or organizational level.

Work Authorization

Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for employment-based visa sponsorship now or in the future. Northern Trust will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work visa status for this opportunity (no sponsorship is available for H-1B, L-1, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, F-1, J-1, OPT, CPT or any other employment-based visa).