Principal Designer

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.

Northern Trust is seeking a Principal Product Designer to lead strategic design efforts on our flagship client facing wealth management platform at Northern Trust. A key contributor on our design team that’s transforming the way wealth management clients engage with our advice and financial services. Join us in collaborating with cross-functional product teams, facilitation of human centric design methodologies, ensuring agile delivery of high-quality financial service solutions and seamless experiences for high-net-worth clients and their advisors.

Enjoy a culture of design excellence, continuous learning, and career growth opportunities. This is a full time, hybrid role in Chicago, IL. As a key member of the design team, your primary role and responsibly is leading the design experience and maturity of our product design system, Storybook components, and Figma Library that support the design and agile teams. To improve client trust and perception of the firm's digital sophistication through a cohesive, polished, and premium user experience.

And ensure that design assets, components, and experience standards continue to evolve with ever changing environment of digital products and services.

• Accelerate product delivery by increasing the availability of reusable, production-ready components, templates, patterns, and page frameworks.
• Improve consistency across advisor, client, prospect, and operational experiences through standardized interaction and visual patterns.
• Strengthen alignment between future-state experience vision, product roadmaps, and implementation through continuous Storybook enhancement.
• Reduce long-term technical and design debt created by delivery-driven compromises that were necessary to support near-term roadmap commitments.
• Increase operational efficiency by reducing duplicate component development and fragmented experience patterns across domains.
• Improve scalability of the platform by creating extensible component architectures that support future products, channels, and business capabilities.
• Increase development efficiency through improved component documentation, implementation guidance, governance, and code reuse.
• Expand enterprise design system integration to ensure greater consistency across platforms, business domains, and delivery teams.
• Improve accessibility maturity by systematically remediating gaps and aligning digital experiences with evolving accessibility standards and best practices.

A Principal Designer ensures that the design of a new or existing product or offering exceeds the needs of the people who these experiences serve. The principal design is a subject matter expert, with deep experience, who leads and collaborates to create truly differentiating experiences reflective of Northern Trust’s capabilities and business objectives as well as client and partner needs and behaviors.

Principal designers work with leadership to craft, refine, implement, and communicate design vision and strategy across teams, business units, and the larger organization. Principal designers take ownership for complex design initiatives, delivering solutions that are driven by deep design and business experience. They act as a resource for colleagues with less experience and will run point on specific design activities.

They are a master storyteller, systems thinker, and have high levels of…