Sr Implementation Lead, SRE (CoP)

About the role

Northern Trust, a Fortune 500 company founded in 1889, is a global financial institution known for its award-winning services and commitment to excellence. The SRE Community of Practice (CoP) Senior Implementation Lead position plays a crucial role in driving SRE practices across the organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Serve as a key enabler in scaling SRE principles, fostering collaboration, and ensuring alignment with enterprise-wide reliability, observability, and automation goals.
• Lead the strategic implementation of SRE frameworks, aligning with global best practices and business objectives.
• Develop and enforce SRE standards, processes, and governance models to drive operational resilience.
• Define and enable SREs to track key reliability metrics (SLOs, SLIs, error budgets) across critical applications and infrastructure.
• Establish and nurture a strong SRE Community of Practice, promoting knowledge exchange and shared learning.
• Organize technical forums, workshops, and training programs to uplift SRE capabilities across engineering teams.
• Act as a mentor and advisor to SRE teams, enabling continuous improvement in site reliability practices.
• Drive the adoption of automation-first approaches for incident response, capacity planning, and release engineering.
• Partner with platform engineering teams to standardize observability, chaos engineering, and self-healing mechanisms.
• Identify and implement industry-leading SRE tools and technologies to enhance system resilience.
• Work closely with engineering, operations, risk, and compliance teams to embed SRE principles into SDLC and ITSM processes.
• Serve as a bridge between leadership and technical teams, translating strategic objectives into actionable SRE initiatives.
• Advocate for a culture of reliability, blameless postmortems, and continuous learning across the enterprise.
• Empower a distributed community of practitioners to work across organizational partitions and contribute to enabler services and systems.
• Continuous improvement and innovation: Evaluate emerging trends in SRE, DevOps, and AI-driven reliability engineering to drive innovation. Establish a feedback loop to measure the impact of SRE initiatives and continuously refine strategies. Promote resilience engineering techniques to proactively identify and mitigate failure points.

Qualifications & Experience

• 10+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, platform engineering, or software reliability engineering roles.
• Strong understanding of SRE principles, cloud-native architectures, modern hybrid architectures, and observability practices.
• Hands-on experience with automation, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools (Dynatrace, Prometheus, Splunk, Azure Monitor), and incident management frameworks.
• Proven ability to build and lead communities of practice within large-scale enterprises.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.

Pay

The salary range for this role is $164,600 - 288,000 USD. Northern Trust offers a comprehensive benefits package including retirement benefits, health and welfare benefits, paid time off, parental and caregiver leave, life & accident insurance, and other voluntary and well-being benefits. A discretionary bonus program may also be included.