Principal Software Engineer: AI-Driven Front-Office FX

Northern Trust Corp; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 137,000 - 234,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits package

Job summary

Northern Trust Corp in Chicago seeks a Principal Software Engineer to design and build front-office trading services for a modern FX platform. You’ll lead breaking up monoliths into microservices, design event-driven flows with Kafka, and deploy cloud-native Azure solutions while collaborating with traders and product owners.

You’ll write production code in Java or C++, own CI/CD, mentor engineers, and apply AI-assisted coding and testing to accelerate delivery.

Qualifications

• 10+ years building production software with strong hands-on coding.
• Experience breaking monoliths into microservices in live systems.
• Proven expertise with Kafka and event-driven architectures.

Responsibilities

• Design and build front-office trading services with low latency and scale.
• Break monoliths into microservices and define boundaries and migrations.
• Design event-driven trade flows using Kafka with schemas and replay patterns.
• Build and deploy cloud-native services on Azure and integrate with on-prem.
• Write production code in Java or C++ weekly and set engineering standards.
• Own CI/CD and automated testing to make production deployment routine.

Skills

Java

C++

Microservices architecture

AI coding tools

Leadership & change

Stakeholder communication

Tools

Kafka

Azure

CI/CD

SQL databases (SQL Server / Postgres)

Job description

Northern Trust Corp in Chicago seeks a Principal Software Engineer to design and build front-office trading services for a modern FX platform. You’ll lead breaking up monoliths into microservices, design event-driven flows with Kafka, and deploy cloud-native Azure solutions while collaborating with traders and product owners.

You’ll write production code in Java or C++, own CI/CD, mentor engineers, and apply AI-assisted coding and testing to accelerate delivery.