Senior Unix Engineer

Northern Trust, a Fortune 500 company, is a globally recognized financial institution that has been in continuous operation since 1889. We 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.

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, and 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, prioritise 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. 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, 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.

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. 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.