Senior AI Security Architect — Enterprise AI Guardrails

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

Benefits offered by this job

401k plan

Pension

Health benefits

Discretionary bonus

Job summary

Northern Trust is establishing an AI Security organization and seeks a Principal AI Security Architect to define and operationalize security architecture, governance, and guardrails for enterprise AI platforms, agentic systems, and digital coworkers. This hands-on role partners with engineering, identity, data, and risk teams to enable AI adoption at scale.

The role emphasizes security pattern development, reference architectures, and practical engineering requirements, with close collaboration

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in security architecture, enterprise architecture, cloud architecture, engineering, or related disciplines.
• Experience designing and reviewing complex enterprise technology solutions.
• Strong understanding of IAM, authentication, cloud security, app security, network security, API security, data protection, logging/monitoring, and secrets management.

Responsibilities

• Serve as lead security architect for AI, agentic AI, cloud, SaaS, and emerging technology initiatives.
• Review and challenge solution designs to identify security requirements, architectural risks, and opportunities for improvement.
• Develop security architecture deliverables including: solution diagrams, data-flow diagrams, trust boundary diagrams, reference architectures, security patterns, design standards, control requirements.
• Conduct threat modeling and security design reviews for AI systems and supporting technology platforms.
• Translate security policies and control objectives into practical engineering requirements.
• Help define security patterns for AI agents and digital coworkers, AI platforms and orchestration frameworks, RAG architectures, MCP integrations, AI identities and delegated authorization models.
• Model access control and governance, AI observability and monitoring.
• Work with delivery teams to accelerate security reviews through reusable patterns and pre-approved architectures.
• Create practical implementation guidance for engineering teams building AI capabilities.
• Build and maintain a library of reusable AI security reference architectures, architectural decision records, and security patterns.
• Develop architecture standards and guardrails for enterprise AI adoption.

Skills

Security architecture

Enterprise architecture

Cloud security

Identity & access

Application security

Data protection

Threat modeling

Security reviews

Azure

Observability

Tools

Azure

Job description

Northern Trust is establishing an AI Security organization and seeks a Principal AI Security Architect to define and operationalize security architecture, governance, and guardrails for enterprise AI platforms, agentic systems, and digital coworkers. This hands-on role partners with engineering, identity, data, and risk teams to enable AI adoption at scale.

The role emphasizes security pattern development, reference architectures, and practical engineering requirements, with close collaboration