Senior Principal, Trade & Settlements

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 Summary The Senior Principal - Trade & Settlements is the senior architecture leader accountable for defining and governing the technology architecture for Settlements Modernization. The role will establish the target-state architecture, transition roadmap and architectural guardrails required to move from a distributed settlement landscape toward an integrated, scalable global settlement ecosystem.

As the modernization matures, the remit will expand from settlement architecture to end-to-end Trade & Settlements architecture, providing architectural direction across trade capture, routing and orchestration, core processing/books and records, market and settlement access, data, reporting, controls, and downstream integrations.

Key Responsibilities
· Own the target-state architecture for Settlements Modernization, including current-state assessment, transition states, capability decomposition, application dispositioning and convergence roadmap.
· Provide end-to-end architecture leadership for the strategic settlement platform and its ecosystem, with TCS BaNCS GSP as the future settlement platform and controlled coexistence with legacy capabilities during phased market migration.
· Translate business, operational, regulatory, resilience and client requirements into architecture principles, reusable patterns, integration contracts and non-functional requirements.
· Define clear domain boundaries and architecture across trade capture, sanctions and sufficiency checks, FX initiation, settlement processing, market/depository connectivity, reconciliation, exception management and reporting.
· Drive simplification and rationalization of the Trade & Settlements application landscape, supported by evidence-based capability mapping, interface analysis and disposition decisions.
· Establish architecture governance for solution designs, APIs/events, data models, security, resilience, observability, cloud adoption and technical debt; ensure design decisions are documented and traceable.
· Partner with product, engineering, operations, risk, information security, infrastructure, data and enterprise architecture teams to ensure modernization decisions work across technology and the operating model.
· Own architectural readiness for market and regulatory change, including evolving settlement cycles and depository/market infrastructure transformations.
· Guide engineering teams through modernization execution. Resolve cross-domain architectural issues, identify dependencies early and provide pragmatic decisions that balance strategic direction with delivery risk.
· Develop architecture talent and a strong community of practice across Trade & Settlements, raising standards for design quality, documentation and technical decision-making.
· Evolve into the principal architecture authority for overall Trade & Settlements, ensuring coherent architecture and investment choices across the complete trade lifecycle.

Expected Outcomes
· A documented and governed target…