Director- Cloud Container Services

About Northern Trust

As a global leader in innovative wealth management, asset servicing, asset management and banking services, Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) is proud to guide the world’s most successful individuals, families, corporations and institutions.

Since 1889, we have aligned our efforts with our three guiding Principles That Endure: Service, Expertise, and Integrity. Together, they reflect the three cornerstones of business conduct which we strive to instill in our employees, whom we call partners, and to provide to our clients and the communities we serve worldwide.

With more than 135 years of financial experience and over 24,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service.

Role Purpose The Cloud Container Platform Product & Engineering Leader owns the strategy, product roadmap, engineering direction, adoption, governance and service outcomes for enterprise container platforms across public and private cloud. The role leads the evolution of container platform capabilities as a product, providing secure, resilient, scalable and reusable services that enable application teams to deploy and operate containerized workloads consistently across the enterprise. The leader combines deep technical credibility with product and people leadership. The role sets the platform vision, prioritizes investments, drives engineering standards and automation, influences technology vendors and internal stakeholders, and partners closely with Operations Service Delivery Managers (SDMs) to ensure reliable day-to-day service delivery. The team owns the container platform engineering capability and developer enablement experience; it does not own application development, application code, or application-specific workload engineering.

Key Accountabilities Product Strategy, Roadmap & Portfolio Ownership · Own the multi-year product strategy and roadmap for enterprise container platforms across public and private cloud. · Define platform outcomes, target capabilities, investment priorities, product lifecycle decisions and measurable adoption goals. · Balance business demand, developer experience, security, resiliency, cost, technical debt and regulatory requirements in roadmap prioritization. · Maintain a transparent feature backlog and communicate platform direction, trade-offs and delivery progress to senior stakeholders. · Assess build, buy and partner options, and influence vendor roadmaps to meet enterprise requirements. Platform Engineering & Technology Leadership · Provide engineering leadership for enterprise Kubernetes and container capabilities, including managed Kubernetes services, private-cloud Kubernetes, container registries, cluster services, networking, ingress, identity, secrets, policy, observability and platform integrations. · Drive platform standardization, reusable patterns, golden paths, automation and self-service onboarding through Infrastructure as Code and GitOps practices. · Establish technology standards and reference architectures for secure multi-tenant container platforms and workload onboarding. · Guide platform modernization, version lifecycle, upgrades, patching, capacity evolution and end-of-life planning. · Remain technically engaged in architecture and engineering decisions, design reviews, complex problem solving and proof-of-concept evaluation. Platform as a Product & Developer Experience · Treat container services as an enterprise product with clear consumers, service offerings, roadmaps, documentation, onboarding journeys and feedback mechanisms. · Improve developer experience through simplified onboarding, product documentation, paved-road patterns, APIs, templates and automated controls. · Partner with application, DevOps and architecture teams to understand demand and translate recurring needs into reusable platform capabilities. · Drive adoption of strategic container platforms and reduce fragmentation, bespoke solutions and unsupported patterns. · Define service boundaries and shared-responsibility expectations between the platform team, application teams, security and operations. Reliability, Operations Partnership & Service Outcomes · Partner with Operations SDMs and support providers to define support models, operational acceptance criteria, runbooks, observability, escalation paths and service-review mechanisms. · Own platform service outcomes, including reliability, resilience, capacity, performance, security posture, lifecycle health and customer experience. · Define and review SLAs, SLOs, service indicators and operational KPIs with engineering and operations stakeholders. · Drive permanent engineering remediation, automation and problem elimination from incidents, recurring support demand and operational data. · Ensure disaster recovery, business continuity and platform resilience expectations are designed, tested and continuously improved. Security, Risk & Governance · Embed security, identity, policy and compliance controls into the platform engineering lifecycle and automated delivery patterns. · Partner with Cybersecurity, Risk, Architecture and Compliance teams on guardrails, vulnerability remediation, audit evidence and regulatory obligations. · Drive least-privilege access, workload isolation, image and supply-chain controls, secrets protection and policy enforcement. · Maintain clear ownership and timely remediation of platform vulnerabilities, technical risks and lifecycle exposures. · Ensure platform changes follow enterprise change, control and governance requirements without compromising engineering agility. Stakeholder, Vendor & Financial Management · Build trusted relationships with application leaders, infrastructure teams, architecture, cybersecurity, operations, finance and senior technology stakeholders. · Serve as the senior product and engineering representative for container platform strategy, investment and service decisions. · Manage strategic relationships with cloud providers, Kubernetes technology partners and managed service providers. · Drive commercial and technical outcomes through vendor governance, roadmap influence, service reviews and accountability for commitments. · Own platform demand, capacity and cost transparency, and promote FinOps practices and efficient consumption patterns. People & Organizational Leadership · Lead, mentor and develop a high-performing team of container platform engineers and technical leaders. · Build capability across Kubernetes engineering, automation, cloud-native architecture, product management, reliability and security. · Establish clear roles, decision rights, engineering standards and outcome-based objectives across globally distributed teams. · Create succession plans, strengthen technical leadership depth and foster a culture of ownership, experimentation, inclusion and continuous improvement. · Coordinate internal teams and strategic partners while retaining accountability for platform direction and engineering quality. Scope Boundaries · The team owns: Container platform product strategy, roadmap, architecture, platform engineering, automation, shared platform services, guardrails, developer enablement and engineering remediation. · The team partners on: Production operations, incident and change execution, service management, capacity, resilience testing, security controls and vendor-supported operations. · The team does not own: Application development, application-specific CI/CD pipelines, business application code, workload-level troubleshooting owned by application teams, or product engineering for applications running on the platform. Required Experience · Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology or a related discipline; an advanced degree is beneficial. · Significant experience in cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, container engineering, DevOps or cloud-native technology leadership. · Proven leadership of enterprise-scale Kubernetes or container platform capabilities across Azure, AWS and/or private-cloud environments. · Demonstrated ownership of a platform product strategy, roadmap, prioritization process and measurable adoption or service outcomes. · Experience leading engineering teams and developing senior technical talent in complex, globally distributed environments. · Experience influencing senior stakeholders, architecture forums, cybersecurity partners, vendors and managed service providers. · Experience partnering with production operations and service delivery teams while retaining accountability for platform engineering and product outcomes. · Experience operating in a regulated enterprise environment with strong technology risk, control, audit and change-management expectations. Technical & Leadership Capabilities Technical / Platform Product / Leadership • Kubernetes architecture and managed services such as AKS and EKS • Platform-as-a-product strategy and roadmap ownership • Private-cloud or on-premises Kubernetes platforms • Executive communication and enterprise stakeholder influence • Containers, registries, Helm and cloud-native ecosystem tooling • Investment prioritization and outcome-based planning • GitOps, CI/CD, GitHub, Argo CD and Infrastructure as Code • Developer experience, product adoption and customer feedback • Terraform/Bicep or equivalent automation frameworks • Architecture governance and technology decision-making • Cloud networking, ingress, service connectivity and private access patterns • Vendor strategy, commercial awareness and roadmap influence • Identity, RBAC, managed identities, secrets and policy controls • People leadership, coaching and organizational capability building • Observability, SRE, resilience, capacity and platform security • Operational partnership, risk management and service accountability Key Success Measures · Clear, funded and actively governed multi-year container platform roadmap aligned to enterprise cloud and application strategies. · Increased adoption of strategic public- and private-cloud container platform services, with reduced platform fragmentation and unsupported patterns. · Improved onboarding speed, developer experience and self-service adoption through automation and standardized golden paths. · Measurable improvement in platform reliability, resilience, security posture, lifecycle currency and operational efficiency. · Reduced manual support effort and recurring incidents through engineering remediation and automation. · Transparent platform capacity, utilization, cost, risk and service-health insights for leadership and consumers. · High-performing engineering organization with strong ownership, technical depth, succession and cross-functional credibility. Leadership Profile A strategic and technically credible platform leader who can move comfortably between executive discussions, product prioritization, architecture decisions, engineering reviews and service-outcome discussions. The successful candidate will combine long-term vision with disciplined execution, create clarity across engineering and operations boundaries, and build a secure, scalable and consumer-focused container platform capability for the enterprise.

Working with Us

As a Northern Trust partner, you will be part of a flexible and collaborative work culture, which has a strong history of financial strength and stability. Movement within the organization is encouraged, senior leaders are accessible, and you can take pride in working for a company committed to an inclusive workplace and assisting the communities we serve.

Philanthropy is deeply rooted in Northern Trust’s history and is an essential element of our culture. Employees around the world give their time and talent to work for the greater good of their communities.

Reasonable Accommodation

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