Principal, Cloud 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 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.

Position Overview

The Cloud Container & Serverless Compute Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing, and supporting containerized and serverless workloads in the cloud. This role builds scalable, resilient, and cost-effective compute solutions while ensuring security, governance, and operational excellence. The engineer collaborates with application development, DevOps, and platform teams to deliver modern cloud-native applications and services.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Engineering

• Design and implement cloud-native architectures leveraging containers (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, ECS, AKS, GKE) and serverless platforms (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions).
• Develop automation for container orchestration, scaling, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Build CI/CD pipelines for deploying containerized and serverless applications.
• Implement API-driven solutions and event-driven architectures using serverless compute.
• Ensure workloads are optimized for performance, cost, and scalability.

Operations & Reliability

• Operate and maintain container platforms and serverless services across multiple cloud environments.
• Implement observability solutions for monitoring, logging, and tracing (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Datadog).
• Troubleshoot runtime issues and improve the resiliency of workloads through autoscaling, load balancing, and failover strategies.
• Ensure platform reliability through automation, testing, and continuous improvement.

Security & Governance

• Enforce security best practices in container and serverless deployments, including secrets management, IAM policies, and network controls.
• Implement compliance controls, vulnerability scanning, and patch management for workloads.
• Ensure container images and serverless functions meet enterprise security and regulatory requirements.

Collaboration & Enablement

• Partner with application teams to modernize workloads using containers and serverless compute.
• Provide technical expertise and guidance on best practices in containerization and serverless design patterns.
• Contribute to standards, playbooks, and reusable frameworks to accelerate adoption.
• Mentor junior engineers and upskill teams on container and serverless technologies.

Qualifications

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 7+ years of experience in cloud engineering, DevOps, or platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience with container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, ECS, AKS, or GKE).
• Strong experience with serverless services (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions).
• Experience with IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM) for managing infrastructure.

Skills & Competencies:

• Proficiency in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Strong programming/scripting skills in Python, Go, or similar.
• Experience with container registries, service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), and API gateways.
• Familiarity with DevOps tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Helm).
• Knowledge of cloud networking, microservices design, and event-driven patterns.
• Strong troubleshooting, problem-solving, and communication skills.

Key Success Metrics

• Uptime, performance, and scalability of container and serverless workloads.
• Speed and reliability of deployments through CI/CD pipelines.
• Cost optimization of compute workloads across serverless and container platforms.
• Compliance with enterprise security and governance standards.
• Developer productivity and adoption of container/serverless solutions

Salary Range:

$137,400 - 233,600 USD

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 acco