Principal Designer

📍 Job Overview

Job Title: Principal Designer

Company: Northern Trust

Location: Chicago, IL, United States

Job Type: FULL_TIME

Category: Product Design / UX/UI Design

Date Posted: June 22, 2026

Experience Level: 10+ years

Remote Status: Hybrid

🚀 Role Summary

• Lead the strategic design and maturity of the product design system, Storybook components, and Figma libraries for Northern Trust's flagship client-facing wealth management platform.

• Drive the enhancement of reusable components, templates, patterns, and page frameworks to accelerate product delivery and improve consistency across advisor, client, and operational experiences.

• Strengthen the alignment between future-state experience vision, product roadmaps, and implementation by continuously enhancing the Storybook, reducing design debt, and increasing operational efficiency.

• Expand enterprise design system integration to ensure greater consistency across platforms and business domains, while systematically remediating accessibility gaps to align with evolving standards.

📝 Enhancement Note: This role is positioned as a Principal Designer, indicating a senior-level individual contributor responsible for significant design strategy and execution, particularly within the context of a design system and its adoption across product development teams. The emphasis on "maturity," "enhancement," and "scalability" of the design system suggests a focus on establishing robust processes and ensuring long-term design governance.

📈 Primary Responsibilities

• Lead the design and evolution of the product design system, ensuring it supports the agile delivery of high-quality financial service solutions and seamless user experiences for high-net-worth clients and their advisors.

• Develop and maintain production-ready components, templates, patterns, and page frameworks within Storybook and Figma libraries to accelerate product delivery cycles.

• Improve user experience consistency across advisor, client, and prospect interfaces by implementing standardized interaction and visual design patterns.

• Collaborate closely with cross-functional product teams, including product managers, engineers, and researchers, to translate business objectives and user needs into compelling design solutions.

• Oversee the continuous enhancement of Storybook to strengthen alignment between experience vision, product roadmaps, and implementation realities, thereby reducing long-term technical and design debt.

• Drive operational efficiency by minimizing duplicate component development and fragmented experience patterns across various product domains.

• Architect extensible component designs that support the scalability of the platform, accommodating