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.

We are seeking a Cloud Foundations Engineer to design, build, and maintain the core cloud infrastructure and shared services that enable our development and business teams to operate securely, reliably, and efficiently in the cloud. This role focuses on establishing the landing zones, automation, governance, and operational guardrails that form the foundation for all cloud workloads.

As a Cloud Foundations Engineer, you will work across multiple teams to ensure that our cloud environments follow best practices for security, scalability, automation, and cost optimization, while enabling self-service adoption by application teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Cloud Platform Engineering
  • Design, implement, and maintain enterprise landing zones and shared cloud services.
  • Manage account/subscription structures across AWS, Azure, and/or GCP.
  • Build and enforce secure-by-default infrastructure patterns.
• Infrastructure as Code & Automation
  • Develop and maintain reusable IaC modules (Terraform, CloudFormation, Bicep, or Pulumi).
  • Build CI/CD pipelines to automate infrastructure deployment and updates.
  • Enable self-service provisioning capabilities for development teams.
• Security, Governance & Compliance
  • Implement identity and access management (IAM) best practices.
  • Configure and maintain guardrails such as policies, SCPs, and monitoring controls.
  • Ensure compliance with regulatory and internal security standards.
• Networking & Connectivity
  • Design and support VPC/VNet architectures, routing, firewalls, VPNs, and interconnects.
  • Establish hybrid connectivity solutions with on-premises environments.
• Observability & Cost Optimization
  • Deploy monitoring, logging, and auditing tools across the environment.
  • Build dashboards to track cloud performance, security posture, and costs.
  • Recommend and implement cost-saving measures.
• Collaboration & Enablement
  • Partner with application, DevOps, and security teams to ensure smooth cloud adoption.
  • Provide documentation, best practices, and training to engineering teams.
  • Participate in incident response and troubleshooting when foundational services are impacted.

Qualifications

• Education & Experience
  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
  • 3+ years of experience in cloud engineering, infrastructure, or platform operations.
• Technical Skills
  • Proficiency with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
  • Strong experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) — Terraform preferred.
  • Hands-on knowledge of networking concepts (VPC, DNS, firewalls, load balancing, hybrid connectivity).
  • Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, etc.).
  • Familiarity with cloud security principles and compliance frameworks.
  • Proficiency in scripting languages (Python, Bash, PowerShell).
• Soft Skills
  • Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting abilities.
  • Effective communication and collaboration across technical and non-technical teams.
  • Ability to balance governance requirements with developer productivity.

Preferred Skills (Nice-to-Have)

• Experience with multi-cloud environments.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes and container orchestration (EKS, AKS, GKE).
• Knowledge of service mesh, API gateways, or serverless platforms.
• Background in FinOps (cloud cost optimization practices).
• Cloud certifications (AWS Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, GCP Professional Cloud Architect).

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.