Principal Cloud Data Platform Engineer

Northern Trust • Chicago, IL

75d

About The Position

The Cloud Data Platform Engineer is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining scalable, secure, and high-performance cloud-based data platforms that support analytics, machine learning, and enterprise data needs. This role ensures that data solutions are optimized for performance, cost, and reliability, while meeting governance, compliance, and business requirements. The engineer collaborates closely with data scientists, analysts, architects, and business stakeholders to deliver modern data capabilities on cloud platforms.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or related field (Master's preferred).
• 7+ years of experience in data engineering, cloud engineering, or platform engineering.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Strong experience with big data and data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Databricks, Flink).
• Proven expertise in building data pipelines with tools like Apache Airflow, dbt, Kafka, or similar.
• Proficiency in SQL and one or more programming languages (Python, Java, or Scala).
• Deep understanding of cloud-native data services (e.g., AWS Redshift, Glue, S3, Athena; Azure Synapse, Data Factory; GCP BigQuery, Dataflow).
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi).
• Knowledge of FinOps principles for cost-efficient data platform design.
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain cloud-native data platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Develop and optimize data pipelines for ingestion, transformation, and processing of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.
• Build reusable frameworks and automation for data workflows, monitoring, and scaling.
• Ensure data storage and compute solutions are optimized for performance, security, and cost efficiency.
• Integrate cloud data services with enterprise applications, APIs, and third-party tools.
• Implement data quality, lineage, and cataloging solutions across the data platform.
• Enforce governance, security, and compliance standards (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, SOC2).
• Work with architects and security teams to implement role-based access, encryption, and audit controls.
• Support metadata management, data discoverability, and enterprise-wide data democratization.
• Manage the operational health of the cloud data platform, including monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting.
• Establish CI/CD pipelines for data services and platform components.
• Implement disaster recovery, backup, and failover strategies.
• Continuously optimize platform performance, cost, and scalability.
• Partner with data scientists, BI teams, and application developers to enable advanced analytics and AI/ML workloads.
• Evaluate emerging cloud data services and recommend adoption based on enterprise needs.
• Provide technical expertise in designing cloud-based data architectures and solutions.
• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to best practices in cloud engineering and data development.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Industry: Securities, Commodity Contracts, and Other Financial Investments and Related Activities
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees