Director, Architect Principal

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: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline, with 15+ years of progressive technology experience including a minimum of 5+ years in a Solution/Enterprise/Principal Architect capacity within financial services Proven track record leading large-scale legacy platform modernization programs, including decomposition of monolithic Oracle/PLSQL or mainframe systems into cloud-native microservices, event-driven, and API-first architectures. Deep expertise across multiple architecture domains - application, data, integration, and infrastructure - with hands-on proficiency in Java/Spring Boot, REST APIs, relational (Oracle, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL/distributed databases, and messaging/streaming technologies (Kafka, MQ). Strong working knowledge of public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including cloud-native design patterns, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure-as-Code for regulated financial workloads. Fluency in financial services regulatory and compliance frameworks relevant to brokerage and equity compensation (SOX, SEC Rule 17a-4, FINRA recordkeeping, IRS Section 409A/423/422, GDPR/CCPA, PCI-DSS) and the ability to embed controls into solution designs. Demonstrated leadership in driving enterprise architecture governance, standards, and reference architectures, partnering with engineering, product, risk, and cybersecurity teams to deliver scalable, resilient, and highly available mission-critical systems. Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, with proven ability to influence C-suite executives, business partners, and technical teams by translating complex architectural concepts into clear business outcomes and trade-offs Deep practical expertise across observability, 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. 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.). Preferred Qualifications: Industry certifications such as TOGAF, AWS/Azure Professional Architect, CISSP, or SAFe Architect. Demonstrated experience architecting end-to-end solutions for equity compensation, stock plan administration, brokerage, or wealth management platforms, including recordkeeping, vesting, tax withholding, corporate actions, and participant servicing workflows. Prior experience at a major financial institution or fintech serving equity plan participants, with familiarity in issuer-side workflows, record keeping, broker integrations, and participant experience platforms. Hands-on exposure to AI/GenAI-driven modernization techniques, including LLM-based reverse engineering of legacy code, automated requirements extraction, intelligent document processing, and human-in-the-loop agentic workflows. Experience with Domain-Driven Design (DDD), event-driven architecture, CQRS, and strangler-fig patterns for incrementally retiring legacy systems while sustaining business continuity Familiarity with modern data architecture paradigms like data mesh, lakehouse, streaming ETL, CDC, and cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift) for analytics, reporting, and regulatory reconciliation use cases. Proven success leading geographically distributed, cross-functional teams of architects, engineers, and product owners in Agile/SAFe environments, including mentoring senior technical talent and building communities of practice. Working knowledge of adjacent capital markets and wealth domains, brokerage clearing/settlement, custody, tax lot accounting, corporate actions processing, and open finance/API ecosystems to drive integrated platform strategies Track record of vendor evaluation and strategic partner management for SaaS/COTS platforms, system integrators, and emerging fintech providers in the equity compensation and wealth ecosystem. In addition to the salary range, this role is also eligible for bonus or incentive opportunities. What's in it for you At Schwab, you're empowered to shape your future. We champion your growth through meaningful work, continuous learning, and a culture of trust and collaboration-so you can build the skills to make a lasting impact. Our Hybrid Work and Flexibility approach balances our ongoing commitment to workplace flexibility, serving our clients, and our strong belief in the value of being together in person on a regular basis. We offer a competitive benefits package that takes care of the whole you - both today and in the future: 401(k) with company match and Employee stock purchase plan Paid time for vacation, volunteering, and 28-day sabbatical after every 5 years of service for eligible positions Paid parental leave and family building benefits Tuition reimbursement Health, dental, and vision insurance What's in it for you: At Schwab, we're committed to empowering our employees' personal and professional success. Our purpose-driven, supportive culture, and focus on your development means you'll get the tools you need to make a positive difference in the finance industry. Our Hybrid Work and Flexibility approach balances our ongoing commitment to workplace flexibility, serving our clients, and our strong belief in the value of being together in person on a regular basis. We offer a competitive benefits package that takes care of the whole you - both today and in the future: 401(k) with company match and Employee stock purchase plan Paid time for vacation, volunteering, and 28-day sabbatical after every 5 years of service for eligible positions Paid parental leave and family building benefits Tuition reimbursement Health, dental, and vision insurance Schwab is an affirmative action employer, focused on employing and advancing in employment, qualified women, racial and ethnic minorities, protected veterans, and individuals with disabilities in the workplace. If you have a disability and require reasonable accommodations in the application process, contact Human Resources at View email address on click.appcast.io or call View phone number on click.appcast.io. Charles Schwab