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.

Hybrid – a balanced model where the successful candidate will spend time both in the office and working from home.

Location:

Chicago, IL.

• 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.
• Continuous 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 use these experiences. 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 influence within business and technology teams.

• Help establish an open culture of optimism, experimentation, curiosity, and rapid prototyping.
• Lead multidisciplinary teams to work together with a shared purpose to deliver great design that addresses user needs.
• Conduct trial and experimentation, recognize that prototyping can be done at various levels of fidelity.
• Synthesize multiple and sometimes conflicting inputs into a common point-of-view.
• Design and specify user interfaces and information architecture using human-centered techniques including observational studies, client and partner interviews, and usability testing.
• Develop others and help identify talent, building teams with a lens to how different personalities and capabilities could fit…