Job Specifications
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.
We're looking for a Senior UNIX Engineer who brings traditional platform depth along with modern engineering practices.
You'll help lead the design, deployment, and lifecycle of mission-critical UNIX platforms and services, while contributing to DevOps tooling, Git-driven workflows, hybrid cloud strategies with an automation mindset.
This is a key role in a high-trust team that powers secure, compliant infrastructure for a global financial institution.
Key Responsibilities Include
Core UNIX Engineering & Support
Design, secure, build, and maintain resilient UNIX environments
Own OS lifecycle strategy: patching, upgrades, security baselines, and hardware refresh planning.
Maintain solutions and performance-tuned enterprise systems.
DevOps, SRE & Automation
Embrace an SRE mindset: treat infrastructure as code, prioritize availability and observability, and automate toil.
Automate provisioning, compliance checks, and config enforcement
Use GitHub for source control, peer-reviewed automation pipelines, change tracking, and documentation versioning.
Contribute to CI/CD workflows for infrastructure as code deployments, and integrate with enterprise tools like ServiceNow, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions.
Security
Ensure UNIX systems are hardened and compliant with security frameworks.
Manage OS-level security policies including firewall rules, kernel parameters, selinux policies and secure configurations.
Integrate systems for identity and privileged access management.
Support audit, forensic, and security event investigations in coordination with InfoSec teams.
Regularly review and remediate security vulnerabilities identified by Qualys, Nessus, or other scanning tools.
Contribute to incident response planning, patching SLAs, and compliance reporting.
Design and maintain logging, audit trails, and syslog/SIEM integrations
Authentication, Authorization, and Directory Services
Integrate UNIX systems with enterprise identity management platforms
Implement and enforce secure access controls, sudo policies, and RBAC schemes.
Collaborate with IAM and InfoSec teams on audit readiness, access provisioning, and PAM integrations.
Monitoring, Reliability & Incident Response
Integrate systems with monitoring tools like Dynatrace, vROps, and custom health scripts.
Support alerting, auto-remediation, and telemetry for performance and availability.
Participate in on-call rotations, DR testing, and RCA for high-impact incidents.
Hybrid Cloud & Platform Modernization
Support UNIX workloads running on VMware and prepare platforms for future cloud integration.
Assist with cloud-readiness assessments, infrastructure modernization efforts, and immutable infrastructure adoption.
Collaborate with Cloud, DevOps, and Cybersecurity teams on secure hybrid operating models.
Documentation & Governance
Maintain robust documentation
Ensure all platforms and automation meet compliance standards.
Lead or contribute to engineering design reviews, change boards, and audit remediation efforts.
The ideal candidate should have a fair amount of the following skills & experience
Proven ability to handle deep technical challenges, that have high visibility.
Prior experience and exposure to UNIX engineering with deep expertise in large enterprise environments.
Strong understanding of centralized authentication/authorization.
Proficiency in shell scripting (bash, ksh, sh); strong familiarity with Python, and Ansible.
Proven experience with infrastructure-as-code principles, Git-driven config management, and CI/CD pipelines leveraging GitHub Actions and Ansible / AWX
Familiarity with automated validation, monitoring, logging, and alerting frameworks.
Passion for automating operations tasks, reducing technical debt, and building sustainable systems.
Proactive, detail-oriented, and comfortable in fast-moving, audit-heavy environments
Diligent with ability to cross check / robust validation of outcomes and results
Excellent communication, documentation, and cross-team collaboration and contribution skills
Experience in financial services or other highly regulated sectors
Exposure to hybrid cloud operations, containerization (e.g., Podman, Docker, Tanzu), or cloud-native UNIX alternatives.
Familiarity with enterprise CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ServiceNow integration).
Relevant certifications (preferred but not required).
Working With Us
As a Northern Trust partner,