Principal SRE Architect — Enterprise-Scale Reliability

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

Job summary

Northern Trust is seeking a Principal Site Reliability Architect / Engineer to lead reliability across critical platforms. You will define reference architectures, guardrails, and maturity models to drive highly observable, operable systems globally.

Collaborating with technology leaders, architects, and engineering teams, you will translate standards into actionable designs, contribute code and automation where needed, and mentor teams to raise operational maturity and resilience across

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience, with 5+ years in site reliability, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering.
• Experience contributing to and evolving reliable, scalable system architectures, including availability, resiliency, and fault‑tolerance patterns.
• Proven ability to translate architectural standards into practical implementations in partnership with engineering and operations teams.
• Experience across cloud and on‑prem environments, with an architectural focus on consistency, observability, and operational maturity.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to articulate architectural trade‑offs and reliability strategies to diverse stakeholders.
• Hands‑on experience with observability solutions, including contributing to and applying standards for metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
• Proficiency in at least one programming or scripting language (e.g., Python, C#, Java).
• Proficiency with at least one IaC or Configuration Management language (e.g., Terraform, Bicep / ARM, Chef, Puppet, Ansible).
• Experience delivering Infrastructure as Code and application deployment automation through CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Create, own, and improve resiliency guidelines with technology management teams.
• Translate resiliency and reliability principles into practical, measurable guidance for application teams.
• Guide adoption and maturity of resilient software and infrastructure architectures to proactively improve our product landscape.
• Provide guidance in incident response and root cause analysis with teams.
• Develop automation to streamline operational tasks and standardize deployment patterns.
• Foster a broader SRE community of practice and align reliability efforts with business goals.

Skills

Observability

Python

C#

Java

CI/CD

Reliability architecture

Communication

Cloud & on‑prem

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

Terraform

Bicep/ARM

Chef

Puppet

Ansible

Job description

Northern Trust is seeking a Principal Site Reliability Architect / Engineer to lead reliability across critical platforms. You will define reference architectures, guardrails, and maturity models to drive highly observable, operable systems globally.

Collaborating with technology leaders, architects, and engineering teams, you will translate standards into actionable designs, contribute code and automation where needed, and mentor teams to raise operational maturity and resilience across