SVP, Head of Network Engineering

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.

Description of role and key responsibilities

Job Summary

The Head of Network Transport Engineering is responsible for switching and routing across our on-premises data centers, colocation facilities, global WAN, Internet, wireline circuits and telecom, campus and WiFi networking across the globe. This role reports to the Global Head of Networking, and peer with Network Application Engineering managers, Network Operations managers and Cloud teams. The role will align to senior Network leaders in offices in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) and APAC (Asia-Pacific) regions

The Network Transport Engineering team executes on a portfolio of projects requiring strategy, capital and expense planning, high-quality design and engineering, strong execution, time and priority management, resource allocation of full-time and contract workers, rigorous design of controls, and time-bound delivery.

In addition, Network Transport Engineering serves as an escalation point for Network Operations during urgent, complex, recurring or persistent outages.

This is a high-impact role in a mission critical area of Technology Infrastructure to continuously modernize and improve network communications to deliver highly-scalable, highly-resilient, well-instrumented and automated services to our applications and clients. Strong personal presence, customer service, communication and proven leadership skills to are essential in order to support our global operating model.

Key responsibilities

Primary areas of responsibility of the team include

• Defining and documenting Network Transport Engineering standards
• Collection of requirements from technology and business areas
• High-level and detailed solution design documents
• Collaboration with procurement activities relating to build and delivery of equipment, software and services
• Ensuring the smooth transition and handover to Network Operations team in alignment with agreed operational acceptance processes
• Managing hardware and software lifecycle for network devices
• Creation and upkeep of technology roadmaps for Network Transport Engineering
• Supporting Architecture organization in undertaking proof of concept activities
• Ensuring skillsets are relevant and up to date to deliver change and provide a high level of support
• Providing escalation support to Operations teams with complex troubleshooting of major incidents, as required
• Providing on call escalation support and provide off-hours support for key weekend implementations
• Supervising IT Service Management change, incident and problem processes for work performed by the team
• Building and operating platforms that run continuously and that allow non-disruptive maintenance and upgrades
• Delivering performance and capacity reports and present to senior leadership
• Ensuring the security of the network platforms
• Enabling solutions that improve the security posture of the overall infrastructure through segmentation and isolation zones.
• Ensuring that IT control standards are designed, implemented and tested
• Managing responsibility for audit and compliance reporting and evidence collection
• Providing world-class observability, instrumentation and telemetry to allow diagnostics and forensics

Core Skills and Knowledge

Core Skills & Experience

• 12-15 years' experience of network engineering solutions within a global enterprise scale organization (5,000-50,000 users) with traditional datacenters and Cloud
• At least 7 years' experience in leading/managing teams
• Considerable first-hand experience of design engineering and building resilient and scalable security solutions
• Experience with risk and control frameworks in a financial or other highly-regulated industry.
• Deep understanding of cybersecurity principles
• Understand the concepts of risk and compliance and how to translate these into effective security solutions.
• Appreciation of automation and orchestration and will have experience of scripting against an API
• Strong understanding of networking at all layers of the OSI stack, and security technologies.
• Familiarity with a variety of testing tools, networking technologies and techniques to accurately troubleshoot and resolve complex technical problems associated with the service, application and network hardware and software.

Technical Skills & Experience

You will have expert knowledge and experience in several of the following areas:

• NGFW platforms and management tools, such as Tufin
• Network Access Control in enterprise environments
• Application delivery and load balancers
• Public and Private cloud security tools and services
• Workflow automation
• Cisco routing and switching
• Arista routing and switching
• WAN optimization
• DNS, IPAM and DHCP
• ServiceNow integrations
• SDWAN solutions
• Network monitoring and reporting tools
• AWS/Azure cloud networking

It is desirable and advantageous to have knowledge and experience of the following technology platforms:

• Check Point, Fortinet, Tufin
• Forescout, Cisco ISE
• F5,
• Infoblox
• Microsoft Active Directory, CyberArk
• Illumio
• Zscaler

Technical Certification

You will have certification or demonstrable working experience of the following:

• Cisco CCNA
• ITILv3 foundation or higher
• AWS Cloud
• Azure Cloud

Personal Attributes

• Highly organized and proven ability to operate within tight deadlines
• Strong problem management and customer service skills.
• Positive attitude and calm under pressure
• Ability to work with global teams to deliver projects, often at pace and under challenging circumstances.
• Ability to interact and present status and next step reports to senior management
• Highest standard of professional integrity
• Willingness to challenge the status quo and pursue continuous improvement
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Ensure staff welfare, while prioritizing the team over the individual
• Outcome-driven rather than effort-driven
• Operate collaboratively across technology groups, regions, the business lines, and employees and clients

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

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.

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