Sr Manager, Systems Availability Engineering (PL)

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.

Charles Schwab’s STS Senior Managers thrive in a leading-edge work culture while focusing on products that help Schwab customers learn, explore and make life-impacting moves on their paths to achieving their goals. This position requires a self-motivated individual with strong problem-solving skills who can contribute in a highly collaborative culture and a team environment and deliver innovative, value-based reliable solutions. A proven track record of delivering high quality technology products and services in a hyper-growth environment where priorities shift quickly is key to success in the role. The successful candidate will bring an ability to prioritize, to communicate clearly and compellingly, and to understand how to drive a high level of focus and excellence building and leveraging a strong team. Our Senior Managers drive their organizations to continuously contribute to evolving the Schwab experience and technology.

The Senior Manager of Systems Availability Engineering will assume a leadership role in the highly visible Client Trader Experience and Market Data Technology team leading Schwab's Cloud and on-prem efforts. The Senior Manager will lead teams working on high availability, maintainability, support and production automation of the trading platforms. The Senior Manager will drive change within the Client Trader Experience and Market Data Technology organization to build a world class Service Availability and Engineering organization, drive application automation and take a visible leadership role leading a consistent operating model, including standard processes, KPIs and practices for service availability, production automation and engineering.

What you are good at

• Participate with other senior leaders to translate strategic plans and goals into tactical plans and objectives for setting priorities. Be the decision maker for administrative or operational matters and ensure objectives are effectively achieved. Provide input to strategy setting
• Build and realize the strategy and lead internal business management functions for the organization, as well as guide the future growth and development of the organization
• Provide input to policy development impacting company-wide issues. Including policy development to manage risk and exposure for the company
• Work on complex issues where analysis of situations or data requires an in-depth knowledge of the company and evaluation of intangibles. Participate in corporate development of methods, techniques and evaluation criteria for projects, programs and people. Ensure budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements. Exercise judgement in determining the methods, techniques and approaches for obtaining results
• Regularly interact with executives and business partners. Communicate strategic technology plans to associated business partners ensuring collaboration across technology and the business. Create formal networks involving coordination among groups.
• Lead highly experienced technologists, creating successful plans to deliver solutions to the business
• Contribute to the overall architectural strategy of the STS organization
• Direct the strategic and tactical business management goals for the team, building client driven technology teams improving the software quality, stability, and availability of technology service provided to the functional businesses
• Build processes and policies that meet or exceed federal guidelines and requirements for financial institutions all while developing frameworks for operational effectiveness that ensure the technology portfolio and governance aligns to the firms’ strategic business goals and objectives
• Exercise managerial rigor over talent and resources; employee development, talent acquisition, staffing and succession plans. Develop a high performance team culture and capabilities by managing talent closely, developing next generation leaders and addressing performance concerns proactively
• Lead continuous improvement efforts within area regularly to improve process and other efficiencies, resulting in tangible cost improvement for project deliveries and support activities

What you have

To ensure that we have fulfilled our promise of "challenging the status quo," this role has specific qualifications that successful candidates should have.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related discipline
• 5+ years’ experience with running medium to large/complex projects or teams with multiple interactions and dependencies. People and team leadership & management
• Ability to identify, attract, recruit and hire talent, and to build high performing teams
• Ability to coach, mentor, and provide direct, timely performance feedback; experience setting direction, tracking progress, and ensuring accountability
• Strong interpersonal, analytical, problem solving and organizational skills
• Ability to work as a contributing member in a high-paced and focused team. Good verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to thrive in a flexible and fast-paced environment, including the ability to think big in a rapidly evolving technology space
• Ability to lead effectively across multiple time zones and locations
• Ability to successfully handle ambiguity
• Experience in planning, implementation and support of business application components, including change and release management.
• Ability to work hands on with team members to inspire and motivate all levels of staff towards both tactical and strategic delivery goals
• Ability to drive change with external counterparties and vendors, managing and enhancing relationships and services provided
• Ability to facilitate dialogue and retrospectives with a diverse group of stakeholders and to review feedback to drive continuous improvement in tools, practices and processes within the emerging enterprise SAvE standards at Schwab
• Proven track record successfully supporting production support efforts using a DevOps/SAvE methodology
• Progressive experience supporting highly available, mission critical environments
• Ability to paint a holistic picture of environment health to technology and business partners leveraging proven strong communication skills, both written and verbal as well as strong presentation skills
• Strong innovation, creativity, and problem-solving skills, including experience facilitating incident management and system recovery efforts

Technical

• 8+ Years of professional experience building and/or supporting distributed scalable enterprise-class applications using web technologies; experience should include supporting and developing applications for .Net or Java, HTML5, Javascript, as well experience with REST services and database programming
• Agile Methodology knowledge and/or Scrum training or certification, with experience leading in an Agile delivery environment.
• Strong technology affinity and experience, as well as attention to detail and the ability to design, execute and maintain strategic goals and metrics
• Own end-to-end availability and performance of mission critical services and build automation to prevent problem recurrence; automate response to all non-exceptional service conditions
• Lead by example, care for your team and establish credibility with the quality of your and your team's technical execution
• Manage on-call rotations across continents, using a follow-the-sun model
• Design, write and deliver software to improve the availability, scalability, latency and efficiency of Schwab's services
• Broad and deep knowledge of IT/software technology and trends, domain knowledge and experience in infrastructure support, application development, quality practices and database administration, including: client/server, web services, portal, middleware, operating systems, databases, networking, security and business intelligence
• Experience working with dashboard / environment health display tooling
• Experience transitioning platforms to cloud-ready

Personal Characteristics

• Shows a commitment to high ethical standards and integrity and demonstrates this through action
• Inquisitive, analytical, a strategic thinker, proactive and solutions-oriented
• High-energy, positive, entrepreneurial in spirit while goal-oriented and results-driven
• Self-starter; takes initiative and can work independently
• Well-organized and disciplined with high attention to detail
• Flexible and adaptable working with various business domains
• Direct, plain-spoken; conveys a genuine/authentic demeanor

Preferred Qualifications

• Post-graduate degree or applicable certification
• Expertise in problem solving and analyzing global scale distributed systems
• 3+ years’ experience in Financial Services Industry a plus

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