Principal SRE

Northern Trust

Confirmed live today High trust

Quick summary

Work type
On-site
Location
Chicago, IL
Salary
$137,400–$233,600 / yr
Posted
1 day ago
Freshness
Confirmed live today

Market check

Salary context

Competitive pay

How this pay compares to similar roles

Similar $187k
This role $186k
$123k most similar roles pay here $270k

This role pays less than 58% of similar roles. Most pay $158,925–$214,500 — the shaded band above. At the midpoint, this role pays about $186k versus about $187k for comparable roles.

Based on 239 similar postings.

Employer

About Northern Trust

Northern Trust is a leading provider of wealth management, asset servicing, asset management, and banking services to corporations, institutions, and high-net-worth individuals. Industry: Financial Services & Asset Management

Northern Trust currently has 50 open roles on FindRole.

Listed pay typically runs $114,500–$194,700 across 45 roles with salary data.

Most-posted roles

View all roles at Northern Trust

At a glance

TL;DR · Principal SRE

Principal, SRE serves as a technical leader responsible for defining the architectural vision and resiliency strategy for critical platforms across the enterprise. This role focuses on embedding reliability into system design, lifecycle governance, and engineering standards rather than relying solely on post-deployment operations. You will create resiliency guidelines, lead root cause analysis sessions to identify systemic failure modes, and build automation for infrastructure configuration and application management. The position requires a hands-on approach to validating architectural decisions through code contribution and partner collaboration. Key technical requirements include experience with distributed systems, networking, and modern application architectures across cloud and on-prem environments. Candidates must be proficient in at least one programming language like Python, C#, or Java, and one Infrastructure as Code tool such as Terraform, Bicep, Chef, Puppet, or Ansible to drive observability and automation.

What you'll do

  • Define and maintain resiliency guidelines to ensure high availability across enterprise systems.
  • Translate complex reliability principles into practical, measurable technical guidance for engineering teams.
  • Lead root cause analysis sessions to identify systemic failures and implement preventive measures.
  • Develop automation logic to streamline repetitive operational tasks and improve infrastructure consistency.
  • Build and standardize monitoring and observability capabilities to detect issues before they impact business operations.
  • Contribute code and scripts to validate architectural decisions and support technical implementation.
  • Establish and lead an SRE community of practice to define standards and governance.

What we're looking for

  • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
  • 5+ years of experience in site reliability, systems engineering, or infrastructure engineering roles.
  • Experience contributing to and evolving reliable, scalable system architectures including availability and fault-tolerance patterns.
  • Ability to translate architectural standards into practical implementations for engineering and operations teams.
  • Experience with cloud and on-prem environments focusing on consistency, observability, and operational maturity.
  • Solid understanding of distributed systems, networking, and modern application architectures.
  • Hands-on experience with observability solutions including metrics, logging, tracing, dashboards, and alerting.
  • Work Authorization.

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