The Lead Enterprise Architect is responsible for the application and business architecture domains across Shared Services. 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.

Knowledge / Skills

• Current hands-on software development experience.

• Significant experience working with enterprise architecture patterns and solid background of enterprise architecture best practices

• Expert-level knowledge of Azure Services including Messaging and Eventing Services, API Management, Azure Kubernetes, Azure Data Factory, Azure Functions and Azure Networking.

• Hands-on experience building enterprise AI solutions, including LLM-based architectures, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Vector Databases and Agent Frameworks.

• Ability to produce reference implementations, reusable accelerators and working examples to unblock engineering teams.

• Experience using development languages and open source frameworks like Java, JavaScript, .Net, Spring, ReactJS, etc.

• Experience using SQL and NoSQL data platforms; e.g. Azure SQL, Azure Postgres, Oracle, SQL Server, CosmosDB.

• Deep knowledge of Architecture Frameworks like TOGAF and/or Zachman

• Knowledge of software development methodologies and tools like Agile (Kanban/Scrum) and GIT, Jira, Maven, Jenkins, etc.

• Experience with DevOps best practices and toolchain / pipeline automation and Azure DevOps.

• Knowledge of the financial services industry and in particular, a broad and deep understanding of products and services provided by Northern Trust.

• Has an understanding of the Shared Services domains at Northern Trust (Cash, Asset Servicing, Risk and Compliance, HR, Finance)

• Strong knowledge of security frameworks and controls.

Major Duties

• Strategy

  • Creation of the Application, Technology and Business Architecture Strategies

  • Influence the strategy and vision of senior decision makers through articulated communications and presentations.

  • Ensures alignment between Technology & Business strategies

• Roadmaps

  • Delivery of multi-year Application and Business Architecture Roadmaps

  • Influence project portfolios towards implementation of the target state

  • Reviews investment spend to ensure alignment with target state and roadmaps

  • 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.

• Strategic Programs

  • Support major programs from an architecture leadership perspective

  • Act as an escalation point for engineering teams to diagnose and resolve complex technical issues across application, integration, cloud, data and AI domains.

  • Partner with Enterprise Architecture and Cloud Engineering to ensure solutions comply with operational, security and resiliency standards.

• Blueprints

  • Create fully functional application architecture blueprints for typical archetypes, e.g. Web, Microservice, Mobile, 3rd party app, etc.

• Enablers

  • Enable the development organization by creating working examples

  • Create frameworks that instill all of the non-functional requirements in scope

  • Define best practices

  • Training technologists and provide project-based consulting/expertise

• Partnership

  • Build strong relationships with key stakeholders.

  • Liaise with the Enterprise Architecture groups

  • Solve problems collaboratively.

Qualifications

• Minimum 15+ years development experience

• Minimum 7+ years architecture experience

• Minimum 1+ year of AI exposure

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience; MBA or Master’s degree preferred