Director, Architect Principal

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.

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.
• In-depth knowledge of 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.