Senior Principal Infrastructure Services (SRE Practice)

Tasks

• Develop a deep understanding of Northern Trust’s business processes and services, and effectively communicate the impact of technology outages to senior management, non-technical stakeholders, and distributed teams.
• Provide a robust, scalable, and highly available SRE automation foundation that spans multiple service platforms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), hybrid on-premises and colocation systems, Microsoft Windows, and Linux/Unix-based platforms.
• Conduct root-cause analyses, translate complex technical issues into understandable business impacts, develop comprehensive remediation strategies, establish preventive measures, and provide continuous monitoring services.
• Lead the design and further development of highly resilient, scalable, and high-performance distributed systems that span numerous services and application areas.
• Collaborate with product owners and application teams to influence system designs that improve observability, automation, and operational agility; positively impact team culture; build resilient systems; and effectively manage external load shifts.
• Define and promote reliability patterns, architectural and technical practices, and tool configurations that align with business outcomes.
• Drive an automation strategy by designing and developing tests, tools, and pipelines that reduce manual work, optimize workflows, and improve both the customer experience and the employee experience.
• Design an evolving engineering process that encompasses infrastructure, configuration, and software deployments, incorporating automated operational controls and security measures, including embedded, non-disruptive operational workflows.
• Participate in or conduct root-cause analyses for production incidents to ensure timely mitigation and resolution during the recovery phase.
• Identify and implement capacity metrics, risks, and threats for one-time or ongoing reliability systems to enable regular assessments and prioritization of services.
• Architecturally design and manage Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Indicators (SLIs), and Alerting and Escalation Response Teams (ARTERs) that provide clear reports on service health, performance, and risks.
• Establish metrics and targets for SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets that reflect customer-centric service-level expectations.
• Initiate efforts that use case-by-case analysis, recent changes, regression testing, and other factors to visualize system failure modes.
• Communicate industry-standard operational best practices, measure them (SRE), turn your vision into a better SRE team, and ensure service reliability.
• Create and maintain team, codebase, and knowledge documentation using industry-standard architectures, standards, and patterns, as well as incident postmortems.
• Proactively share service capacity metrics, availability, performance, and fault tolerance with peer teams.
• Work closely with product, development, platform, security, and operations teams to integrate SRE principles into team frameworks.
• Act as a trusted advisor, mentoring compliance teams and operational staff to shape business insights for the benefit of Northern Trust and its external stakeholders.
• Drive the adoption of strategic SRE programs that measurably improve cross-functional collaboration, incident response, and operational efficiency.
• Manage and prioritize multiple workload initiatives (including technical and business system operations needs, with a focus on cross-functional collaboration).