Senior Lead Full Stack Developer

Overview

The Senior Lead Full Stack Developer will provide hands-on technical guidance, owning the design, build, and operational stability of critical services and integrations. This role is accountable for delivering high-quality, scalable, and resilient solutions while setting engineering standards and guiding development teams. The role combines deep technical execution with leadership responsibilities, acting as the primary technical authority for Java-based services, event-driven processing, and cloud-native deployments on Azure.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of full stack services using event driven architecture.
• Own end-to-end delivery of features and technical capabilities, from design through production support.
• Ensure services are reliable, observable, and operationally ready prior to release.

Backend & Integration Development

• Design and implement backend services using Java and Spring Boot.
• Build and maintain REST APIs that integrate with vended applications and upstream and downstream systems.
• Design and operate event-driven workflows using Kafka, including producers, consumers, retries, and error handling.

Data & Persistence

• Design and manage data models and access patterns using Azure Cosmos DB.
• Ensure data consistency, performance, and scalability aligned with integration patterns.
• Partner with data and platform teams on schema evolution and data governance requirements.

Cloud & Platform Engineering

• Deploy and operate services on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
• Contribute to containerization, Helm charts, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Partner with platform teams to ensure best practices around scaling, resiliency, and cost efficiency.

Operational Excellence & Stability

• Act as a senior escalation point for production issues.
• Lead root cause analysis and drive permanent fixes for systemic issues.
• Ensure monitoring, alerting, and logging are implemented and tuned for actionable insights.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Provide technical direction and code-level guidance to engineers within the workstream.
• Set expectations for code quality, testing, and engineering discipline.
• Mentor senior and mid-level developers, promoting ownership and continuous improvement.

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Partner closely with product owners, architects, and upstream and downstream teams.
• Communicate technical risks, tradeoffs, and delivery impacts clearly to non-technical stakeholders.
• Contribute to planning, dependency management, and delivery commitments.

Required Skills & Experience

Core Technical Skills (Mandatory)

• Strong expertise in Java and Spring Boot.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka in production environments.
• Strong REST API design and implementation experience.
• Experience with Azure Cosmos DB, including performance and scalability considerations.
• Experience deploying and operating services on Azure AKS.

Additional Qualifications

• 12 plus years of software development experience in enterprise environments.
• Experience building and supporting distributed, cloud-native systems.
• Working knowledge on data engineering and modern data platform such as Snowflake, Databricks.
• Strong understanding of production support, observability, and operational readiness.
• Experience working in regulated or high-availability environments preferred.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills.

Salary Range

$114,500 - 194,700 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.

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