Sr. Lead, Software Engineering

ntrs

Chicago (IL)

On-site

USD 140,000 - 200,000

Full time

5 days ago

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Job summary

Northern Trust is seeking a Senior Lead Software Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across the design, development, modernization, and delivery of digital solutions within the Client Onboarding & Enrollments portfolio.

The role blends deep software engineering with architecture influence, cloud engineering, DevOps, AI-assisted development, and team enablement, partnering with Product, Architecture, Engineering, QA, SRE, and stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, and

Qualifications

Experience leading design and delivery of complex enterprise digital solutions.
Strong background in Java/JEE, Spring Boot and REST APIs.
Proven ability to mentor engineers and set engineering standards.

Responsibilities

Lead the design, development, implementation, and modernization of complex enterprise digital solutions.
Provide technical direction across multiple applications and teams.
Conduct architecture reviews ensuring scalability, security, and performance.
Promote clean-code practices, TDD, and contract-first development.
Drive DevOps, CI/CD, and automation across the lifecycle.

Skills

Technical leadership

Mentoring engineers

Architecture influence

Hands-on software engineering

Stakeholder collaboration

Tools

Java/JEE

Spring Boot

REST APIs

Microservices

Event-driven architectures

Azure

SQL/Oracle

Observability tooling

CI/CD tooling

Job description

About Northern Trust

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.

With more than 135 years of financial experience and over 24,000 partners, we serve the world's most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service.

Role Overview

The Senior Lead Software Engineer is responsible for providing hands‑on technical leadership across the design, development, modernization, and delivery of digital solutions supporting the Client Onboarding & Enrollments portfolio. This role combines deep software engineering expertise with architecture influence, cloud engineering, DevOps, AI-assisted development, and team enablement. The Senior Lead partners closely with Product, Architecture, Engineering, QA, SRE, and business stakeholders to deliver secure, scalable, resilient, and high‑performing digital products. The role serves as a senior technical leader across engineering teams, driving engineering standards, mentoring engineers, addressing complex technical challenges, and ensuring solutions align with enterprise architecture, security, risk, and governance requirements.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Engineering

Lead the design, development, implementation, and modernization of complex enterprise digital solutions.

Remain hands‑on with Java/JEE, Spring Boot, REST APIs, microservices, event‑driven architectures, and modern web applications.

Provide technical direction across multiple applications, components, and engineering teams.

Lead technical design and architecture reviews to ensure scalability, security, performance, resiliency, and maintainability.

Establish and promote clean‑code practices, reusable engineering patterns, Test‑Driven Development (TDD), and spec‑driven/contract‑first development.

Perform and guide code reviews, technical deep dives, proof‑of‑concepts, and resolution of complex engineering challenges.

Partner with architects and senior engineers to define and continuously improve engineering standards and reference patterns.

Cloud, Platform & Modernization

Design and deliver cloud‑native solutions leveraging Microsoft Azure and modern engineering practices.

Provide technical leadership across Azure compute, networking, storage, integration, security, and cloud database capabilities.

Drive modernization of legacy applications and services toward scalable, API‑first, event‑driven, and cloud‑native architectures.

Ensure solutions are designed for availability, observability, scalability, performance, resiliency, and operational supportability.

Provide technical guidance for data architecture, integration patterns, Oracle/SQL, Elasticsearch, MQ/Solace, and related enterprise technologies.

DevOps, Quality & Automation

Champion Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, automated testing, and infrastructure automation practices.

Drive Test‑Driven Development and comprehensive automation across unit, integration, regression, and system testing.

Strengthen CI/CD pipelines and release practices to improve deployment reliability, quality, and delivery velocity.

Partner with DevOps and SRE teams to improve monitoring, logging, alerting, dashboarding, incident response, and production readiness.

Identify recurring operational issues and drive engineering improvements that reduce technical debt and improve application stability.

AI‑Assisted Engineering

Champion responsible adoption of AI‑assisted software engineering tools and practices to improve developer productivity, quality, and engineering effectiveness.

Identify opportunities to incorporate AI‑assisted development, intelligent automation, code generation, testing, documentation, and engineering productivity capabilities into development workflows.

Establish effective engineering practices that combine AI‑assisted development with appropriate code review, testing, security, and governance controls.

Engineering Excellence & Team Enablement