Sr Implementation Lead, SRE (CoP)

Location: Chicago, IL

Remote Type: Hybrid

Time Type: Full time

Job Description

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.

Overview

The SRE Community of Practice (CoP) Senior Implementation Lead is responsible for driving the adoption, standardization, and maturity of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices across the organization. This role serves as a key enabler in scaling SRE principles, fostering collaboration, and ensuring alignment with enterprise-wide reliability, observability, and automation goals.

Key Responsibilities

SRE Practice Implementation & Governance

• Lead the strategic implementation of SRE frameworks, aligning with global best practices and business objectives.
• Develop and enforce SRE standards, processes, and governance models to drive operational resilience.
• Define and enable SREs to track key reliability metrics (SLOs, SLIs, error budgets) across critical applications and infrastructure.

Community Building & Knowledge Sharing

• Establish and nurture a strong SRE Community of Practice, promoting knowledge exchange and shared learning.
• Organize technical forums, workshops, and training programs to uplift SRE capabilities across engineering teams.
• Act as a mentor and advisor to SRE teams, enabling continuous improvement in site reliability practices.

Automation & Tooling Enablement

• Drive the adoption of automation-first approaches for incident response, capacity planning, and release engineering.
• Partner with platform engineering teams to standardize observability, chaos engineering, and self-healing mechanisms.
• Identify and implement industry-leading SRE tools and technologies to enhance system resilience.

Collaboration & Cross-Functional Engagement

• Work closely with engineering, operations, risk, and compliance teams to embed SRE principles into SDLC and ITSM processes.
• Serve as a bridge between leadership and technical teams, translating strategic objectives into actionable SRE initiatives.
• Advocate for a culture of reliability, blameless postmortems, and continuous learning across the enterprise.
• Empower a distributed community of practitioners to work across organizational partitions and contribute to enabler services and systems

Continuous Improvement & Innovation

• Evaluate emerging trends in SRE, DevOps, and AI-driven reliability engineering to drive innovation.
• Establish a feedback loop to measure the impact of SRE initiatives and continuously refine strategies.
• Promote resilience engineering techniques to proactively identify and mitigate failure points.

Qualifications & Experience

• 10+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, platform engineering, or software reliability engineering roles.
• Strong understanding of SRE principles, cloud-native architectures, modern hybrid architectures, and observability practices.
• Hands-on experience with automation, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools (Dynatrace, Prometheus, Splunk, Azure Monitor), and incident management frameworks.
• Proven ability to build and lead communities of practice within large-scale enterprises.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.

Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for employment-based visa sponsorship now or in the future. Northern Trust will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work visa status for this opportunity (no sponsorship is available for H-1B, L-1, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, F-1, J-1, OPT, CPT or any other employment-based visa) 

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.