Senior Lead Software Engineer

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.

We are seeking a highly experienced Senior Lead Full Stack Developer to provide technical leadership and deliver secure, resilient, and scalable digital solutions for the financial services industry. This role combines hands-on engineering with architecture, delivery leadership, and team mentorship. The successful candidate will guide the development of cloud-native applications using Java, Spring Boot, Microsoft Azure, and React.js while ensuring solutions meet demanding standards for performance, availability, security, auditability, and regulatory compliance.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end design, development, testing, deployment, and support of enterprise-grade full stack applications.
• Define solution architecture and engineering standards for Java, Spring Boot, RESTful APIs, microservices, React.js, and Azure-based platforms.
• Translate business and product requirements into maintainable technical designs, delivery plans, and measurable outcomes.
• Develop high-quality backend services and responsive user interfaces, contributing directly to complex or critical features.
• Design secure integrations with internal platforms, third-party providers, data services, and financial systems.
• Drive cloud-native engineering using appropriate Azure compute, data, messaging, identity, monitoring, and deployment capabilities.
• Establish and enforce coding, API, testing, observability, resiliency, and documentation standards.
• Lead design reviews, code reviews, performance tuning, defect resolution, and production-readiness assessments.
• Champion DevSecOps practices, CI/CD automation, infrastructure as code, automated testing, and secure software supply-chain controls.
• Partner with product owners, architects, cybersecurity, risk, compliance, infrastructure, data, and operations teams.
• Mentor engineers, support technical growth, delegate effectively, and foster a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.
• Provide technical leadership during production incidents, perform root-cause analysis, and ensure sustainable corrective actions.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience leading the design and delivery of complex enterprise applications.
• Advanced proficiency in Java and Spring Boot, including microservices, REST APIs, data access, security, concurrency, error handling, and performance optimization.
• Strong hands-on experience with React.js, JavaScript or TypeScript, component-based design, state management, responsive interfaces, and frontend testing.
• Proven experience designing and delivering solutions on Microsoft Azure, including secure cloud architecture, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases, SQL, data modeling, transactions, and performance tuning; familiarity with NoSQL patterns is beneficial.
• Experience with event-driven architecture, messaging, caching, API gateways, and distributed-system design patterns.
• Strong understanding of authentication, authorization, encryption, secrets management, secure coding, vulnerability remediation, and privacy controls.
• Experience with Git-based development, CI/CD pipelines, automated unit and integration testing, artifact management, and production release practices.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical discussions, influence architecture decisions, mentor engineers, and communicate effectively with technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Experience with Azure services such as App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, Functions, API Management, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Key Vault, Microsoft Entra ID, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Storage, Application Insights, and Azure Monitor.
• Experience with containers, Azure Container Apps (ACA), Docker, Terraform or Bicep, and cloud configuration management.

Preferred Qualifications

• Knowledge of domain-driven design, test-driven development, contract testing, feature flags, blue-green or canary deployment, and site reliability engineering practices.
• Familiarity with financial controls and expectations related to data protection, audit trails, segregation of duties, operational resilience, and change governance.
• Experience in banking, payments, wealth management domain.
• Experience modernizing legacy applications and incrementally migrating workloads to cloud-native architectures.
• Azure, Java, architecture, security, or agile delivery certifications.

Leadership Competencies

• Technical judgment: balances strategic architecture with pragmatic delivery.
• Ownership: takes accountability for quality, risk, reliability, and business outcomes.
• Collaboration: builds alignment across engineering, product, architecture, operations, and control functions.
• Communication: explains complex technical decisions clearly and documents them effectively.
• Coaching: raises team capability through mentorship, feedback, and strong engineering practices.
• Continuous improvement: uses metrics, incident learning, and customer feedback to improve systems and delivery.

Salary Range:

$114,500 - 194,700 USD

Salary range is a good faith estimate of base pay. Northern Trust provides a comprehensive benefits package including retirement benefits (401k and pension), health and welfare benefits (medical, dental, vision, spending accounts and disability), paid time off, parental and caregiver leave, life & accident insurance, and other voluntary and well-being benefits. Northern Trust also provides a discretionary bonus program that may include an equity component.

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).

Working with Us

As a Northern Trust partner, you will be part of a flexible and collaborative work culture, which has a strong history of financial strength and stability. Movement within the organization is encouraged, senior leaders are accessible, and you can take pride in working for a company committed to an inclusive workplace and assisting the communities we serve.

Philanthropy is deeply rooted in Northern Trust’s history and is an essential element of our culture. Employees around the world give their time and talent to work for the greater good of their communities.

Reasonable Accommodation

Northern Trust is committed to working with and providing adjustments to individuals with health conditions and disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please email our HR Service Center at [email protected], or alternatively you can discuss your individual requirements with the recruiter you are working with.