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
Own the strategy, product roadmap, engineering direction, adoption, reliability and end-to-end service performance of enterprise data and database platforms.
Platform scope
Analytical platforms and services, including Snowflake, Databricks and Microsoft Fabric, together with OLTP and operational database services such as Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle and Azure Cosmos DB.
Operating model
Lead platform engineering and product ownership while partnering closely with Operations Service Delivery Managers (SDMs) and support teams for stable, secure and efficient day-to-day service delivery.
Leadership profile
A technically credible platform leader who can translate business demand into product capabilities, influence vendors and stakeholders, and grow adoption across the enterprise.
Position Overview
The Cloud Data Platform Product & Engineering Leader is accountable for the full lifecycle of enterprise data and database platform services. The role combines deep technical leadership with product ownership, service management and commercial influence. It covers analytical and AI-enabled platforms as well as operational and transactional database services, ensuring that the portfolio evolves as a coherent enterprise capability rather than a collection of individually managed technologies.
The leader will define the platform vision and multi-year roadmap, prioritize investment, guide engineering standards, drive adoption, and ensure reliable and secure service delivery. The role will work closely with Operations SDMs, platform engineering teams, architecture, security, risk, application teams, data engineering teams and strategic technology vendors to ensure smooth day-to-day operations while progressing modernization, automation and customer-led product outcomes.
This is not a traditional people-manager or operations-only position. It requires a leader who can move comfortably between executive strategy, architecture and engineering decisions, product prioritization, vendor negotiations, operational governance and direct engagement with internal platform consumers.
Scope boundary: This team will provide Cloud Data Infrastructure Platform Engineering as a product. It will build and operate the shared infrastructure, platform services, automation, controls and self-service capabilities that enable data engineering, analytics, data science and AI/ML teams. It will not perform the application-level data engineering or data scientist activities owned by those consuming teams.
Role Mandate
· Own the enterprise product strategy and roadmap for Cloud Data Infrastructure Platform services supporting analytics, AI/ML, data engineering, OLTP and operational database workloads.
· Run the platform portfolio as a set of secure, resilient, scalable, cost-effective and consumable enterprise products.
· Establish clear service boundaries: the team owns Cloud Data Infrastructure Platform Engineering as a product, while consuming teams retain responsibility for data pipeline development, data transformation, analytical model development, data science and business use-case implementation.
· Balance innovation and modernization with operational stability, regulatory…