Senior Lead Full Stack Developer

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 world’s 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 22,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service.

Role Overview

The Senior Lead Full Stack Developer will provide hands‑on technical guidance, owning the design, build, and operational stability of critical services and integrations. This role is accountable for delivering high‑quality, scalable, and resilient solutions while setting engineering standards and guiding development teams.

The role combines deep technical execution with leadership responsibilities, acting as the primary technical authority for Java‑based services, event‑driven processing, and cloud‑native deployments on Azure.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Delivery & Ownership

• Lead the design and development of full stack services using event driven architecture.
• Own end‑to‑end delivery of features and technical capabilities, from design through production support.
• Ensure services are reliable, observable, and operationally ready prior to release.

Backend & Integration Development

• Design and implement backend services using Java and Spring Boot.
• Build and maintain REST APIs that integrate with vended application and upstream and downstream systems.
• Design and operate event‑driven workflows using Kafka, including producers, consumers, retries, and error handling.

Data & Persistence

• Design and manage data models and access patterns using Azure Cosmos DB.
• Ensure data consistency, performance, and scalability aligned integration patterns.
• Partner with data and platform teams on schema evolution and data governance requirements.

Cloud & Platform Engineering

• Deploy and operate services on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Contribute to containerization, Helm charts, and CI CD pipelines.
• Partner with platform teams to ensure best practices around scaling, resiliency, and cost efficiency.

Operational Excellence & Stability

• Act as a senior escalation point for production issues.
• Lead root cause analysis and drive permanent fixes for systemic issues.
• Ensure monitoring, alerting, and logging are implemented and tuned for actionable insights.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Provide technical direction and code‑level guidance to engineers within the workstream.
• Set expectations for code quality, testing, and engineering discipline.
• Mentor senior and mid‑level developers, promoting ownership and continuous improvement.

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Partner closely with product owners, architects, and upstream and downstream teams.
• Communicate technical risks, tradeoffs, and delivery impacts clearly to non‑technical stakeholders.
• Contribute to planning, dependency management, and delivery commitments.

Required Skills & Experience

Core Technical Skills (Mandatory)

• Strong expertise in Java and Spring Boot.
• Hands‑on experience with Kafka in production environments.
• Strong REST API design and implementation experience.
• Experience with Azure Cosmos DB, including performance and scalability considerations.
• Experience deploying and operating services on Azure AKS.

Additional Qualifications

• 12 plus years of software development experience in enterprise environments.
• Experience building and supporting distributed, cloud‑native systems.
• Working knowledge on data engineering and modern data platform such as Snowflake, Databricks.
• Strong understanding of production support, observability, and operational readiness.
• Experience working in regulated or high‑availability environments preferred.
• Excellent problem‑solving, communication, and leadership skills.

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) 

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.

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 sustainable companies! Build your career with us and apply 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 [email protected].

 
We hope you’re 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.