Overview
Join to apply for the Principal, Cloud Engineer role at Northern Trust .
Northern Trust is a Fortune 500 company and a globally recognized financial institution with a history dating back to 1889. The organization provides innovative financial services and guidance to clients worldwide, guided by service, expertise, and integrity.
Position Overview
The Cloud Container & Serverless Compute Engineer is responsible for designing, implementing, and supporting containerized and serverless workloads in the cloud. This role builds scalable, resilient, and cost-effective compute solutions while ensuring security, governance, and operational excellence. The engineer collaborates with application development, DevOps, and platform teams to deliver modern cloud-native applications and services.
Key Responsibilities
Architecture & Engineering
- Design and implement cloud-native architectures leveraging containers (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, ECS, AKS, GKE) and serverless platforms (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions).
- Develop automation for container orchestration, scaling, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
- Build CI/CD pipelines for deploying containerized and serverless applications.
- Implement API-driven solutions and event-driven architectures using serverless compute.
- Ensure workloads are optimized for performance, cost, and scalability.
Operations & Reliability
- Operate and maintain container platforms and serverless services across multiple cloud environments.
- Implement observability solutions for monitoring, logging, and tracing (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch, Datadog).
- Troubleshoot runtime issues and improve the resiliency of workloads through autoscaling, load balancing, and failover strategies.
- Ensure platform reliability through automation, testing, and continuous improvement.
Security & Governance
- Enforce security best practices in container and serverless deployments, including secrets management, IAM policies, and network controls.
- Implement compliance controls, vulnerability scanning, and patch management for workloads.
- Ensure container images and serverless functions meet enterprise security and regulatory requirements.
Collaboration & Enablement
- Partner with application teams to modernize workloads using containers and serverless compute.
- Provide technical expertise and guidance on best practices in containerization and serverless design patterns.
- Contribute to standards, playbooks, and reusable frameworks to accelerate adoption.
- Mentor junior engineers and upskill teams on container and serverless technologies.
Qualifications
Education & Experience:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- 7+ years of experience in cloud engineering, DevOps, or platform engineering.
- Hands-on experience with container orchestration platforms (Kubernetes, ECS, AKS, or GKE).
- Strong experience with serverless services (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions).
- Experience with IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM) for managing infrastructure.
Skills & Competencies
- Proficiency in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
- Strong programming/scripting skills in Python, Go, or similar.
- Experience with container registries, service mesh (Istio, Linkerd), and API gateways.
- Familiarity with DevOps tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Helm).
- Knowledge of cloud networking, microservices design, and event-driven patterns.
- Strong troubleshooting, problem-solving, and communication skills.
Key Success Metrics
- Uptime, performance, and scalability of container and serverless workloads.
- Speed and reliability of deployments through CI/CD pipelines.
- Cost optimization of compute workloads across serverless and container platforms.
- Compliance with enterprise security and governance standards.
- Developer productivity and adoption of container/serverless solutions.
Salary Range
$137,400 - 233,600 USD
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, you will be part of a flexible and collaborative work culture in an organization where financial strength and stability support exploration of 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 how your interests and experience could 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 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
We value an inclusive workplace and understand flexibility means different things to different people. Apply today and discuss your flexible working requirements.
Chicago, IL – Location details and salary ranges are provided in the posting.
Seniority level
- Mid-Senior level
Employment type
- Full-time
Job function
- Engineering and Information Technology