Director, Principal Architect

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).

The Schwab Capacity Planning Team, within the Application Architecture team, is looking for a director-level Principal Architect with a Site Reliability Engineering background who is passionate about ensuring the capacity, availability, and resiliency of critical applications and infrastructure to ensure that clients can transact anytime through the channels of their choice. Working across business and technological domains, this role will drive application capacity strategy across a wide variety of activities such as public cloud adoption, acquisitions and integrations, application modernization, and digital enablement.

The Principal Architect role at Schwab is a key position requiring senior technology expertise, representing the best technical talent in the firm and best practices in the industry. Principal Architects form a community of technology leadership at Schwab and are critically influential in driving technology strategy and guidance within their teams and across the enterprise.

This role reports to the Office of the CTO, chartered to establish technology governance, standards, practices, and strategy for the entire firm, enabling thousands of technologists to better serve the millions of Schwab clients and trillions of dollars in client assets. The role requires close collaboration with architects and engineers across the Schwab Technology Services (STS) organization.

Position Responsibilities:

• Map key business transactions (KBTs) and critical infrastructure components, assess the current capacity baseline, and overlay current vs. proposed demand and capacity to meet business needs.
• Provide guidance and standards in the design and implementation of robust, scalable, reliable, and highly available systems.
• Drive development of monitoring and alerting capabilities to help predict capacity and performance issues based on past trends; use data-driven approaches and analytics to correlate business metrics and client expectations, new environments, and market conditions into insights.
• Partner with Infrastructure & Operations (I&O), Cloud, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and Strategy & Business Management (SBM) organizations within STS to capture business, application, and infrastructure metrics for capacity assessment and translate those into infrastructure needs.
• Translate the impact of capacity issues into business performance measures and assist in the reporting of risks and insights.
• Scale capacity planning practices beyond KBTs and critical infrastructure components and strengthen the community of practice for application and infrastructure architecture at Schwab in collaboration with architects across STS.

What you have

Required Qualifications:

• S./B.A. in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a statistical or other quantitative field is minimally required.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in application architecture, design, and development, hosting and maintaining complex and highly scalable systems in highly regulated industries (e.g., finance, insurance, healthcare, government).
• 7+ years of experience as a solution architect, site reliability architect, or principal architect in solutioning and maintenance architecture using a wide range of technical stacks, such as the Python data science stack (Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, Jupyter, etc.) and the full Java development stack.
• 7+ years of working experience with databases (e.g., SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.).
• 5+ years of experience in architecting and designing systems for optimized scaling and performance.
• 5+ years of experience working effectively at all levels of an organization, with the ability to influence and inspire others and lead decisions that provide clear, positive results to the company.
• 5+ years of experience with data mining, business intelligence, analytics, and visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, Power BI) and data frameworks.
• 5+ years of experience with monitoring and alerting tools (Grafana, Datadog), automation of tools and scripts to streamline processes and manual intervention, including infrastructure as code (IaC).
• 5+ years of experience with problem solving, performing root cause analysis and business impact analysis for incidents related to capacity and scalability, as well as performing application health assessments for application areas considered at risk for capacity and scalability.
• 3+ years of experience in cloud (public or private) native design, including event-driven applications, configuration and deployment strategies, and security and performance tuning of large data streams and APIs.
• 3+ years of experience in cloud (GCP, AWS, Azure) native design, including microservices, containers, event-driven applications, configuration and deployment strategies, and security and performance tuning of large data streams and APIs.
• 3+ years of experience curating architectural principles, guidance, and governing architecture based on established principles.
• 2+ years of experience leading a center of excellence for architecture.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s or advanced degree.
• Experience in financial services, investment management, and securities markets.
• Exceptional communication skills and the ability to communicate and collaborate appropriately at all levels of the organization. This includes written and verbal communication, as well as visualizations.
• Strong interpersonal skills, with the ability to navigate organizational boundaries across architecture, engineering, and operations.
• Great team player with a startup and agile mindset (minimum viable product, learn-it-all, adaptable to change, flexible in wearing different hats temporarily as needs arise) to drive outcomes

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