Director, Principal Cloud Architect

About the role

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 Principal Cloud Architect will help shape the next generation of enterprise cloud and AI strategy and translate that strategy into secure, resilient, scalable, and reusable solutions. This senior individual-contributor role combines deep cloud architecture expertise with demonstrated experience designing production-grade AI and Enterprise Cloud platforms and solutions. The architect will lead technical workstreams, establish reusable architecture patterns, mentor peers, and drive alignment across engineering, architecture, security, data, risk, and platform teams. The ideal candidate will bring deep experience designing enterprise-scale cloud solutions, with strong architecture depth in GCP and demonstrated ability to operate effectively across AWS and Azure. Success requires strong technical judgment, clear architectural communication, and the ability to translate executive strategy into practical engineering execution in a highly regulated environment.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture of secure, resilient, scalable, operable, and maintainable enterprise cloud and AI solutions from strategy and option analysis through production implementation and operational readiness.
• Lead complex architecture workstreams, reviews, and governance decisions across architecture, engineering, security, data, risk, infrastructure, and operations, balancing delivery needs with architecture integrity, enterprise standards, and long-term sustainability.
• Mentor engineers, architects, and technical leaders, and create reusable guidance that improves cloud and AI architecture quality, technical judgment, design consistency, and organizational capability.
• Translate business and technology requirements into reusable cloud and AI architecture patterns, reference designs, decision frameworks, and implementation guidance that reduce duplication, accelerate delivery, and improve security, resiliency, operational consistency, and enterprise scalability.
• Ensure cloud and AI solutions align with enterprise architecture, security, data, privacy, compliance, model-risk, resiliency, operational, and governance requirements. Clearly document architecture decisions, alternatives, assumptions, risks, exceptions, mitigations, and ownership.
• Communicate effectively with engineers, architects, executives, and governance partners. Translate complex cloud and AI topics, limitations, risks, and tradeoffs into clear decisions, actionable plans, and accountable next steps.
• Drive clarity, decisions, and execution in ambiguous, fast-moving environments with evolving requirements, competing priorities, and multiple stakeholders.
• Partner with engineering and platform teams to move architecture from concept through implementation, production readiness, and ongoing operational ownership. Validate critical assumptions through proofs of concept, implementation reviews, infrastructure-as-code reviews, and technical evaluation where appropriate.
• Bring strong critical thinking, problem-solving ability, and sound technical judgment to complex enterprise challenges.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience in technology architecture, including at least 8 years designing enterprise cloud solutions and demonstrated recent experience architecting production AI or generative AI capabilities.
• Deep experience creating enterprise architecture designs in GCP or AWS, with GCP strongly preferred, covering compute, networking, identity, data