Lead, Software Engineering

About Northern Trust

As a global leader in innovative wealth management, asset servicing, asset management and banking services, Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) is proud to guide the world’s most successful individuals, families, corporations and institutions.

Since 1889, we have aligned our efforts with our three guiding Principles That Endure: Service, Expertise, and Integrity. Together, they reflect the three cornerstones of business conduct which we strive to instill in our employees, whom we call partners, and to provide to our clients and the communities we serve worldwide.

With more than 135 years of financial experience and over 24,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service.

Role Overview

The Salesforce Lead Developer is responsible for leading the design, development, integration, and delivery of Salesforce solutions supporting the Client Onboarding & Enrollments portfolio.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role responsible for building scalable, secure, maintainable, and high-performing solutions on the Salesforce platform. The Lead Developer partners with Product, Architecture, Engineering, QA, DevOps, and business stakeholders to translate business requirements into effective technical solutions while ensuring alignment with enterprise architecture, security, risk, and governance standards.

The role also provides technical guidance and mentorship to developers, drives engineering best practices, and supports modernization and integration between Salesforce and enterprise platforms.

Key Responsibilities

Salesforce Development & Technical Leadership

• Lead the design, development, testing, and implementation of complex Salesforce solutions.
• Provide hands-on development using Apex, Lightning Web Components (LWC), SOQL/SOSL, Salesforce Flow, triggers, asynchronous processing, and APIs.
• Design reusable, scalable, and maintainable Salesforce components and services.
• Lead code reviews and technical design reviews and promote Salesforce development best practices.
• Ensure solutions appropriately balance declarative configuration and custom development.
• Design solutions with consideration for Salesforce platform constraints, performance, scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Troubleshoot complex application and production issues and drive root-cause resolution.

Apex, LWC, APIs, integrations, unit testing and code review are core elements commonly associated with Lead Salesforce Developer responsibilities.

Integration & Enterprise Architecture

• Design and implement integrations between Salesforce and internal/external enterprise platforms.
• Develop and maintain REST APIs, web services, event-driven integrations, and asynchronous processing solutions.
• Partner with enterprise and solution architects to define integration patterns and technical standards.
• Ensure integrations are resilient, secure, observable, and scalable.
• Support solutions involving Salesforce and cloud-native or distributed enterprise applications.
• Drive effective data exchange and synchronization while maintaining appropriate system-of-record boundaries.

Platform Engineering & DevOps

• Champion automated CI/CD, source control, testing, release management, and DevOps practices for Salesforce development.
• Establish consistent development and deployment practices across Salesforce engineering teams.
• Improve automated testing and deployment quality to reduce production risk.
• Partner with DevOps and platform teams to improve development environments and release processes.
• Drive improvements in application logging, monitoring, alerting, and production support.

Engineering Quality

• Establish and enforce development standards for Apex, LWC, integrations, automation, and configuration.
• Promote clean-code principles and modular, reusable solution patterns.
• Champion automated unit, integration, regression, and end-to-end testing.
• Identify and address technical debt, performance issues, and maintainability concerns.
• Ensure solutions are designed for operational supportability and long-term sustainability.

Security, Risk & Governance

• Design Salesforce solutions aligned with enterprise security and data-protection requirements.
• Apply appropriate Salesforce security controls, including permissions, access controls, sharing, and data security.
• Identify and mitigate technology, operational, data, and security risks.
• Proactively address platform vulnerabilities and technical risks.
• Ensure applications adhere to organizational architecture standards, development standards, security policies, and governance requirements.
• Support regulatory and audit requirements associated with enterprise and financial-services applications.

Team Leadership & Mentoring

• Provide technical leadership, mentoring, and coaching to Salesforce developers.
• Guide engineers through design discussions, code reviews, troubleshooting, and technical deep dives.
• Help developers strengthen Salesforce platform, integration, DevOps, and engineering capabilities.
• Promote ownership, accountability, engineering excellence, and continuous improvement.
• Work closely with architects and other engineering leads on technical direction and platform strategy.

Technical leadership, mentoring, architecture coordination, code review, and addressing technical debt are consistent with expectations for a Salesforce Lead Developer.

Collaboration & Delivery

• Partner with Product Owners, Business Analysts, Architecture, QA, DevOps, Security, and Operations.
• Translate complex business requirements into effective Salesforce solution designs.
• Participate actively in Agile planning, design, estimation, development, and delivery.
• Communicate technical decisions, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborate effectively across globally distributed engineering teams.
• Proactively identify delivery and technology risks and recommend pragmatic solutions.

Required Qualifications

Technical Skills

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including significant Salesforce development experience.
• Strong hands-on expertise with: ApexLightning Web Components (LWC)SOQL/SOSLSalesforce APIs and integrationsSalesforce Flow and declarative automationTriggers and asynchronous processingSalesforce data modeling and security
• Strong understanding of Salesforce platform architecture and development best practices.
• Experience designing and implementing enterprise integrations using REST APIs and web services.
• Experience with source control, CI/CD, deployment automation, and DevOps practices.
• Strong understanding of automated testing and application quality practices.
• Experience troubleshooting performance, integration, data, and production issues.
• Understanding of enterprise security, authentication, authorization, and data-protection principles.

Salesforce-focused developer roles commonly require both programmatic skills such as Apex and JavaScript/LWC and knowledge of declarative capabilities, data models, security, and automation.

Leadership & Professional Skills

• Proven ability to lead complex Salesforce development initiatives.
• Strong mentoring and technical leadership capabilities.
• Ability to influence technical decisions and drive engineering standards.
• Strong analytical, design, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to work effectively with Product, Business, Architecture, QA, and Engineering stakeholders.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-paced, globally distributed enterprise environment.

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field.
• 7+ years of overall software engineering experience.
• Strong experience delivering enterprise Salesforce solutions.
• Experience working within Agile delivery environments.
• Experience with client onboarding, workflow automation, digital products, or transaction-processing applications within financial services is preferred.

Preferred Qualifications

• Salesforce Platform Developer certification(s).
• Salesforce architecture-related certification or equivalent architecture experience.
• Experience with large-scale Salesforce implementations and modernization initiatives.
• Experience integrating Salesforce with Java/microservices-based enterprise applications.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and enterprise integration platforms.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure.
• Experience with AI-assisted development tools and modern engineering productivity practices.
• Experience working in highly regulated, enterprise-grade environments.

Salary Range:

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.

Work Authorization

Applicants must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for employment-based visa sponsorship now or in the future. Northern Trust will not sponsor applicants for U.S. work visa status for this opportunity (no sponsorship is available for H-1B, L-1, TN, O-1, E-3, H-1B1, F-1, J-1, OPT, CPT or any other employment-based visa).

Working with Us

As a Northern Trust partner, you will be part of a flexible and collaborative work culture, which has a strong history of financial strength and stability. Movement within the organization is encouraged, senior leaders are accessible, and you can take pride in working for a company committed to an inclusive workplace and assisting the communities we serve.

Philanthropy is deeply rooted in Northern Trust’s history and is an essential element of our culture. Employees around the world give their time and talent to work for the greater good of their communities.

Reasonable Accommodation

Northern Trust is committed to working with and providing adjustments to individuals with health conditions and disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please email our HR Service Center at MyHRHelp@ntrs.com, or alternatively you can discuss your individual requirements with the recruiter you are working with.