Director, Principal Architect – Capacity Planning

Your opportunity

At Schwab, you are 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 Site Reliability Engineering background, who is passionate about ensuring the capacity, availability and resiliency of critical applications & infrastructure to ensure that clients can transact anytime through the channels of their choice.  Working across business and technology domains, this role will drive application capacity strategy across a wide variety of activities such as public cloud adoption, acquisitions & 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 in their team and across the enterprise.

This role reports up 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.

Specific goals will include:

• Map key business transactions (KBTs) and critical infrastructure components, assess current capacity baseline, overlay current vs proposed demand & capacity to meet business needs.
• Provide guidance and standards in design & implementation of robust, scalable, reliable and high-availability systems.
• Create monitoring and alerting capabilities to help predict capacity and performance issues based on past trends, use data driven approaches and analytics to correlate of business metrics and client expectations, new environments, and market conditions to 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 to infrastructure needs.
• Translate the impact of capacity issues into business performance measures, assist in the reporting of risks and insights.
• Scale the 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

• B.S. / B.A in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science or in Statistical and other quantitative field is minimally required.
• 10+ years of progressive experience in application architecture, design, and development, hosting and maintenance of complex and highly scalable systems in highly regulated industries (e.g., finance, insurance, healthcare, government).
• 7+ years of experience in in solution or as site reliability architect or principal architect in solutioning and maintenance architecture using wider range of technical stacks such as Python data science stack (Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, Jupyter, etc.), full Java development stack or equivalent
• 5+ years of experience in system scaling and performance.
• 5+ years of experience working effectively at all levels of an organization with the ability to influence others, inspire others and to 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, Grafana, Power BI, Datadog) and data frameworks.
• 5+ year 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.
• 5+ years of experience with monitoring, alerting tools and automation of tools and scripts in streamline processes and manual intervention including infrastructure as code (IaC).
• 3+ years of experience in cloud (public or private) native design including event-driven applications, configuration and deployment strategies, security and performance tuning of large data streams and APIs.
• 3+ years of curating architectural principles, guidance and to govern architecture based on established principles.
• 2+ years of experience leading center of excellence for architecture.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s or advanced degree.
• Experience in financial, 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 communications, as well as visualizations.
• Strong interpersonal skills, with the ability to navigate across organizational boundaries of architecture, engineering, and operations.
• Great team player with a start-up and agile mindset (most viable product, learn it all, adoptable to changes, flexible to wear different hats temporarily with arising needs) to drive outcomes.
• Understanding and practice experience of industry standard capacity planning, capacity management processes and SRE practices.
• Enterprise-wide awareness of the business domains in relation to core business processes, capabilities, and enabling technology platforms.
• Experience in machine learning, operations research and developing descriptive, predictive, prescriptive and anomaly detection data modeling techniques.
• Strong experience and engagement in DevOps, continuous integration, testing, data center and deployment architecture and business capability modelling.
• Experience transforming detailed architectural views as solutions for critical business functions.
• Track record of maintaining stakeholder business knowledge, goals, and annual objectives to anticipate business needs.

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