Principal Cloud Data Platform Engineer

About Northern Trust:

Northern Trust a Fortune 500 company is a globally recognized award-winning financial institution that has been in continuous operation since 1889.

Northern Trust is proud to provide innovative financial services and guidance to the worlds most successful individuals families and institutions by remaining true to our enduring principles of service expertise and integrity. With more than 130 years of financial experience and over 22000 partners we serve the worlds most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service.

The Cloud Data Platform Engineer is responsible for designing building and maintaining scalable secure and high-performance cloud-based data platforms that support analytics machine learning and enterprise data needs. This role ensures that data solutions are optimized for performance cost and reliability while meeting governance compliance and business requirements. The engineer collaborates closely with data scientists analysts architects and business stakeholders to deliver modern data capabilities on cloud platforms.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Engineering & Development

• Design implement and maintain cloud-native data platforms (e.g. AWS Azure GCP).
• Develop and optimize data pipelines for ingestion transformation and processing of structured semi-structured and unstructured data.
• Build reusable frameworks and automation for data workflows monitoring and scaling.
• Ensure data storage and compute solutions are optimized for performance security and cost efficiency.
• Integrate cloud data services with enterprise applications APIs and third-party tools.

Data Management & Governance

• Implement data quality lineage and cataloging solutions across the data platform.
• Enforce governance security and compliance standards (e.g. GDPR HIPAA SOC2).
• Work with architects and security teams to implement role-based access encryption and audit controls.
• Support metadata management data discoverability and enterprise-wide data democratization.

Operations & Reliability

• Manage the operational health of the cloud data platform including monitoring alerting and troubleshooting.
• Establish CI/CD pipelines for data services and platform components.
• Implement disaster recovery backup and failover strategies.
• Continuously optimize platform performance cost and scalability.

Collaboration & Innovation

• Partner with data scientists BI teams and application developers to enable advanced analytics and AI/ML workloads.
• Evaluate emerging cloud data services and recommend adoption based on enterprise needs.
• Provide technical expertise in designing cloud-based data architectures and solutions.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to best practices in cloud engineering and data development.

Qualifications

Education & Experience:

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Data Engineering or related field (Masters preferred).
• 7 years of experience in data engineering cloud engineering or platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS Azure or GCP).
• Strong experience with big data and data processing frameworks (e.g. Spark Databricks Flink).
• Proven expertise in building data pipelines with tools like Apache Airflow dbt Kafka or similar.

Skills & Competencies:

• Proficiency in SQL and one or more programming languages (Python Java or Scala).
• Deep understanding of cloud-native data services (e.g. AWS Redshift Glue S3 Athena; Azure Synapse Data Factory; GCP BigQuery Dataflow).
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker Kubernetes).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform CloudFormation Pulumi).
• Knowledge of FinOps principles for cost-efficient data platform design.
• Strong problem-solving communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Salary Range:

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.

Working with Us:

As a Northern Trust partner greater achievements await. 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.

Movement within the organization is encouraged senior leaders are accessible and you can take pride in working for a company committed to assisting the communities we serve!Join a workplace with a greater purpose.

Wed love to learn more about how your interests and experience could be a fit with one of the worlds most admired and sustainable companies! Build your career with us andapply today.#MadeForGreater

Reasonable accommodation

Northern Trust is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process please email our HR Service Center at .

We hope youre excited about the role and the opportunity to work with us. We value an inclusive workplace and understand flexibility means different things to different people.

Apply today and talk to us about your flexible working requirements and together we can achieve greater.