Principal - Head of Compliance Architecture

Northern Trust · Chicago

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. Compliance Architect serves as the senior architecture authority across Financial Crimes, Regulatory Compliance, Regulatory Change portfolios, along with expanding involvement with Legal / Audit technology portfolios. This role is accountable for establishing target-state architecture, governing technology strategy, accelerating platform modernization, and ensuring regulatory technology solutions operate as an integrated ecosystem. The architect provides strategic leadership across SaaS, cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premise platforms; enterprise data environments; vendor solutions; engineering organizations; and compliance capabilities, ensuring technology investments deliver scalable, resilient, secure, and compliant business outcomes. Major Duties

Serves as the lead architecture authority for Financial Crimes, Regulatory Compliance, Regulatory Change portfolios, providing technical leadership across Anti-Money Laundering (AML), KYC, Sanctions Screening, Fraud Prevention, Ethics & Conduct, Trade Surveillance, Electronic Communications Surveillance, Regulatory Change Management, Compliance Risk Assessment, Compliance Testing, Compliance Monitoring capabilities.
Establishes and maintains the target-state architecture vision across the portfolio, ensuring technology solutions align with regulatory obligations, business strategy, enterprise architecture standards, and long-term technology objectives.
Develops portfolio-level architecture roadmaps and modernization strategies, identifying opportunities for capability expansion, platform rationalization, cloud adoption, technical debt reduction, cost optimization, and technology transformation.
Defines and governs enterprise architecture principles, engineering standards, design patterns, and technology reference architectures across SaaS, cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premise environments.
Leads evaluation and selection of strategic technology platforms and vendor solutions, performing architecture due diligence and providing recommendations regarding scalability, resiliency, security, integration complexity, supportability, and total cost of ownership.
Establishes architecture standards and governance processes for commercial, SaaS, and internally developed solutions, ensuring consistency across application, integration, data, infrastructure, and security domains.
Designs and governs enterprise integration patterns across critical source systems, including payment systems, trade processing platforms, client onboarding systems, sanctions screening platforms, master data management solutions, regulatory reporting systems, and operational platforms.
Provides strategic oversight of enterprise data architecture, including data acquisition, transformation, governance, lineage, quality, analytics, reporting, and AI enablement capabilities leveraging technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, cloud data platforms, real-time streaming technologies, and enterprise data ecosystems.
Establishes architecture standards supporting modern cloud and distributed systems including API-led architectures, event-driven integration, microservices, container platforms, cloud-native services, and platform engineering practices.
Provides architectural leadership and governance for critical compliance technology platforms, including AML and transaction monitoring solutions, Actimize, sanctions screening platforms, fraud management solutions, ServiceNow IRM, regulatory change platforms, surveillance technologies, and audit automation capabilities.
Drives enterprise resiliency, recoverability, and operational excellence initiatives including active-active architectures, hot-hot disaster recovery models, blue-green deployment strategies, high availability design, observability, fault tolerance, and business continuity readiness.
Establishes and improves engineering discipline and software delivery practices, including CI/CD pipelines, DevSecOps operating models, automated testing, release governance, engineering standards, infrastructure-as-code, software lifecycle management, and technical debt governance.
Participates in enterprise architecture review boards and design governance forums, providing technical oversight and approval for strategic initiatives, architecture exceptions, platform roadmaps, and major technology investments.
Partners with Product Management, Compliance, Risk, Audit, Operations, Cyber Security, Infrastructure, Data Management, and Engineering organizations to ensure technology capabilities support strategic regulatory objectives and business outcomes.
Provides leadership support to technical leads, engineering managers, and development teams, fostering architecture consistency, engineering excellence, and operational maturity across the portfolio.
Advises executive leadership on technology strategy, emerging technologies, architecture risks, platform investment decisions, modernization opportunities, regulatory technology trends, and enterprise technology direction.
Carries out the most complex initiatives involving multiple disciplines, technologies, regulatory requirements, and stakeholders while balancing business value, risk, cost, and operational sustainability.

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