Director, Platform Architect Principal - Wealth Management

About the role

This role is part of a highly talented and experienced architecture team responsible for setting the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the Schwab Wealth and Advice Solutions platform. The team works in close partnership with Enterprise Architecture, ensuring architectural decisions support long-term business goals, future scalability and high resiliency. The team's collaborative approach with product leaders fosters an environment where cutting-edge technology solutions are appreciated as a critical component of achieving business objectives which drive ongoing market leadership.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the target architecture for wealth management platforms, including Schwab Wealth advisory systems, portfolio management, CRM integrations, client portals, digital advice, Wealth vendor integration.
• Lead architecture strategy, reference architectures, and technology roadmaps that improve scalability, security, availability, and advisor and client experiences.
• Design secure, scalable integration patterns across core wealth applications, custodians, market data providers, enterprise services, third-party fintech platforms, and AI-enabled capabilities.
• Drive platform modernization through cloud adoption, API enablement, microservices, event-driven architecture, containerization, and selective AI/ML implementation.
• Collaborate with business leaders, product teams, peer architects, enterprise architects, engineers, and external vendors to translate business capabilities into cohesive technical solutions and interoperable platform designs.
• Evaluate and recommend wealth technology platforms, vendor ecosystem capabilities, and emerging technologies to enhance advisor productivity, client experience, and operational efficiency.
• Provide architectural leadership across the software delivery lifecycle, resolving complex technical challenges and guiding implementation decisions.
• Ensure solutions comply with financial services regulations, cybersecurity standards, AI governance, and data privacy requirements.
• Stay current on industry trends in wealth management technology, generative AI, analytics, and digital advisory platforms, and apply that insight to drive innovation.

Required Qualifications

• Extensive experience serving as a Technical Architect for large-scale, enterprise-wide wealth management platforms, with deep expertise across portfolio management, trading and rebalancing, risk, reporting, financial planning, CRM, client engagement, and wealth management operations.
• 10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, preferably in Java, with at least 5+ years designing, developing, and integrating solutions in the investment services or wealth management industry.
• Strong technical depth in enterprise application architecture across distributed systems, APIs, middleware, microservices, event-driven systems, and hybrid cloud environments.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing cloud-native solutions, with expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) strongly preferred.
• Solid understanding of the wealth management technology ecosystem, including custodians, portfolio management platforms, CRM solutions, reporting tools, financial planning systems, and advisor workstation technologies.
• Experience leading cloud transformation and digital modernization initiatives in financial services.
• Knowledge of regulatory and compliance requirements, data governance, cybersecurity principles, responsible AI practices, and security controls relevant to financial services environments.
• Experience supporting production operations and applying Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles to improve system reliability, observability, performance, and operational excellence.
• Familiarity with AI/ML integration patterns, modern data architecture concepts, and the practical application of emerging technologies in enterprise platforms.
• Excellent communication, documentation, stakeholder management, and leadership skills, with the ability to influence senior stakeholders, build alignment, and drive decisions across diverse teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Utilizes intelligence of the investment services industry, market, and competition to influence business strategy.
• Promotes creativity, experimentation, and strategic thinking to differentiate Schwab from its competitors.
• Experience with Enterprise Architecture practices and standards.
• 10+ years architecting scalable, highly available web, UI/UX, and microservices-based solutions.
• Hands-on experience with Angular and modern front-end architecture patterns.
• Strong experience architecting and building cloud-based or cloud-ready applications strongly preferred.
• Experience with cloud-native architecture and platforms such as Kubernetes, GKE, API management, and Apigee.
• Experience with relational or cloud-native databases, including Oracle and Cloud SQL PostgreSQL.
• Experience with security, IAM, and enterprise-grade financial systems integration is a plus.
• Familiarity with AI/ML integration concepts, Vertex AI, BigQuery, data analytics, and observability and monitoring tools.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, with GitHub suite preferred.
• Experience working in Agile development environments.