Specialist, Lead Solution Architect

About Northern Trust:
Northern Trust provides innovative financial services and guidance to corporations, institutions and affluent families and individuals globally. With 130 years of financial experience and nearly 20,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service. 

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 that is committed to strengthening the communities we serve!                
We recognize the value of inclusion and diversity in culture, in thought, and in experience, which is why Forbes ranked us the top employer for Diversity in 2018. 

We’d love to learn more about how your interests and experience could be a fit with one of the world’s most admired and ethical companies. Build your career with us and apply today.

The Lead Solution Architect is responsible for delivering strategic solutions for Shared Services Technology.  The candidate will be a key member of the Shared Services Architecture team whose collective responsibility is to promote strategic technology advancement across the organization through a set of fully aligned technical strategies, roadmaps, designs, patterns, and frameworks.  This role will partner with executives, their architects and application development teams, and firmwide architects.  Must demonstrate a proven history of building large scale technology solutions that effectively address the business objectives of a complex organization.  Ensures that business strategy along with market & technology trends are effectively represented in the organization’s systems and business processes.  Analyzes the architectural requirements, defines the vision, defines the target state architecture, analyzes the current state, establishes roadmaps and governs the project portfolio and partners with solution architects/engineers to realize the target state.   

This individual must be delivery-oriented, possess excellent analytical and communication skills with the ability to reach senior business management as well as technical audiences. Must be able to influence project direction and make pragmatic decisions to optimize the balance between strategic value, time to market, cost and risk.  Identify shared services, overlapping capabilities and convergence to standards in order to improve efficiency and quality, and reduce time to value. The preferred candidate will have a broad background in application development, cloud-native delivery, integration, data, and architecture.  Must be able to work independently to solve complex problems, create/manage technology plans, yet possess the soft skills to work with a variety of partners.  

Major Duties

•    Identify appropriate technical solutions that provide business value while mitigating technical debt.
•    Mediate conflicting priorities to drive optimal solutions.
•    Identify and escalates duplication of efforts, functional and technical redundancy, and enforces the use of existing firm-wide shared services.
•    Create fully functional frameworks for typical archetypes, e.g. Web, Microservice, Mobile, 3rd party app, etc.
•    Quickly build proof of concept prototypes with new technologies being researched.
•    Enable the development organization by creating working examples
•    Create cloud-related frameworks that instill all of the non-functional requirements in scope
•    Define cloud delivery best practices
•    Training technologists and provide project-based consulting/expertise
•    Liaise with the Enterprise Architecture groups
•    Solve problems collaboratively.
•    Acts as a subject matter expert on technologies and trends in cloud, middleware, and infrastructure architectures.