Senior Director Software Development

About the role

Northern Trust, a Fortune 500 company, is a globally recognized, award-winning financial institution with over 130 years of financial experience and over 22,000 partners. Northern Trust is dedicated to providing innovative financial services and guidance to the world’s most successful individuals, families, and institutions while maintaining its core values of service, expertise, and integrity.

Duties

• Partner with business stakeholders to design end-to-end platforms, defining components and interactions that support the target operating model.
• Provide strategic direction across technology teams, aligning execution with enterprise goals and influencing senior leadership on outcomes.
• Translate business strategy into technology outcomes by surfacing cross-functional concerns, synthesizing inputs, and building consensus on solutions.
• Build, develop, and organize teams to drive program-level initiatives.
• Manage multiple units or functions through managers and technical leads, overseeing project planning, status reporting, specifications, and implementation for major software solutions.
• Mentor and develop less-senior leaders through coaching and structured growth opportunities.
• Deliver value iteratively and with a sense of urgency.
• Lead capability technology delivery across multiple teams of developers, quality assurance, support, and change management technology experts.
• Set performance standards; run performance management; identify training and development needs; and build management capability for advanced leadership roles.
• Manage vendor relationships to ensure outcomes (quality, performance, and scalability) meet business demands.
• Define and govern technical architectures (security, observability, scalability, reliability, and recovery) and ensure compliance.
• Ensure compliance with audit requirements, including change control procedures and data security.
• Improve technology team effectiveness and productivity, and identify opportunities to help business teams do the same.

Experience

• Deep functional industry knowledge of alternative investment financial services.
• Success designing and building enterprise-level applications, including complex data architectures, in a highly regulated environment (e.g., financial services).
• Progressive responsibility leading technical teams (e.g., developers, data engineers, business analysts, quality assurance, and production support).
• Understanding of data shape and context design to enable efficient and effective AI/LLM usage.
• Knowledge of modern data storage architectures and data modeling.
• Experience with microservices architecture, cloud-native development, CI/CD, and automated builds.
• Understanding of modern security architectures, including implementing secure applications and protecting PII and HSI in public cloud environments.
• Understanding of financial markets and financial instrument types.
• Experience with Agile project methodology and collaboration.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Effective communication skills, including with senior executive management.
• Ability to adapt quickly and effectively to change.

Education

B.S. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related discipline required; M.S. preferred. 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).

Benefits

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.

Working With Us

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where all employees feel valued and respected. We encourage candidates from diverse backgrounds to apply and are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. As a Northern Trust partner, you will be part of a flexible and collaborative work culture in an organization where financial strength and stability is an asset that emboldens us to explore new ideas. Move within the organization is encouraged, senior leaders are accessible, and we are committed to assisting the communities we serve!