Principal Architect, Site Reliability Engineering

Your Opportunity

At Schwab, you're empowered to make an impact on your career. Here, innovative thought meets creative problem solving, helping us "challenge the status quo" and transform the finance industry together.

We believe in the importance of in-office collaboration and fully intend for the selected candidate for this role to work on site in the specified location(s).

Workplace Services Engineering (WSE) is an organization within Schwab Technology Services that is embarking on a major transformation. We support Workplace Services, and we're shaping the future of how people experience financial well‑being at work. We partner with leading employers to deliver innovative retirement, equity, and workplace financial solutions that help millions of participants build stronger financial futures. This is a fast‑growing, high‑impact business where scale meets purpose—where your work directly influences how people plan, save, invest, and succeed.

As a key growth engine for the firm, we're investing more than ever to expand our capabilities, modernize platforms, and elevate the experiences we deliver to employers and their employees. Our teams work at the intersection of technology, service, and financial expertise—supporting workplace clients with solutions that scale, adapt, and deliver meaningful outcomes. Here, your ideas help shape what's next for workplace financial services. If you're energized by solving complex problems, collaborating across disciplines, and making a real difference in the workplace services industry, you'll find your place here.

As a Principal Architect, Site Reliability Engineering for Schwab's Technology Solutions organization, you will be responsible for building a purposeful, proactive, and sustainable approach to reliability on a foundation of SRE principles. You will partner with multiple support teams, architects, developers, and other stakeholders to develop common tools and guidance and drive adoption of key reliability engineering practices in support of large-scale and mission-critical services. Through your deep SRE knowledge and history of implementation, you will have open, candid conversations with senior leaders and engineers and play a pivotal role in establishing a foundational SRE practice at Schwab.

Position Responsibilities:

• Evangelize SRE mindset and practice across the Schwab Technology Solutions organization.
• Partner with support, development, and business stakeholders to develop, measure, and leverage service level objectives.
• Design and develop solutions to eliminate toil and manual effort from day-to-day support responsibilities.
• Identify and implement improvements to logging, metrics, and tracing telemetry and triaging capabilities across a diverse technology stack.
• Lead complex triage and postmortem activities for critical issues and drive prioritization/resolution of remediation items.
• Perform chaos engineering experiments to improve application resilience to known and unknown failures.
• Document reliability guidance and best practices. Advocate for and drive adoption of said practices.
• Foster a culture of learning through coaching, mentoring, and knowledge sharing around reliability practices, processes, and tools.
• Develop tools, frameworks, and instrumentation to validate and increase release success for applications.

What You Have

Required Qualifications:

• Minimum 5+ years in SRE role, with at least 3+ years in an architect or leadership position with a hands-on track record of operating mission-critical systems at scale.
• At least 3 or more years of experience designing and implementing highly scalable and fault tolerant systems.
• Deep practical expertise across observability, incident management, resilience engineering, and capacity planning, not just familiarity, but proven delivery in production environments.
• Demonstrated experience using AI tools to solve real reliability problems: anomaly detection, incident triage, noise reduction, postmortem acceleration, capacity forecasting, or auto-remediation and reduce repetitive operational toil.
• Proven ability to define and enforce technical standards across multiple engineering teams or business units without direct managerial authority.
• In-depth knowledge of resilience patterns (i.e. circuit breakers, timeouts, retries, etc.) and how to design and implement them.
• In-depth knowledge of CI/CD processes and tools to ensure software is delivered safely using known deployment strategies (i.e. blue/green, canary deployments, feature toggles, etc.).
• Authored technical postmortems with root cause analyses and documented action items that resulted in measurable resiliency improvements.
• Contributed to the SLO strategy for at least 5 teams, ensuring alignment with business and client objectives.
• Three or more years hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk), with a proven track record of setting up dashboards and alerts.
• Led or participated in cross-functional SRE-focused initiatives that included key stakeholders from both technical and business units.
• Participated in resilience or chaos engineering exercises, with documentation showing a reduction in unplanned downtime.
• Presented findings or led training sessions to share SRE practices, enhancing team performance or adoption rates for reliability engineering methods.
• Mentored SRE engineers and engineering teams in SRE best practices, with improvements in incident resolution speed and reliability metrics.
• Authored and maintained comprehensive SRE documentation for critical systems or workflows, including incident response guides, runbooks, operational playbooks, SLO implementation, and observability.

In addition to the salary range, this role is also eligible for bonus or incentive opportunities.