Director, Observability Principal & Architect

Your Opportunity

Schwab remains committed to providing increased visibility to career growth opportunities and job requirements. This posting announcement is part of increased transparency and while all qualified applicants will be reviewed and considered, this organization has a preferred candidate identified for this role.

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.

Schwab Technology Services enables the future of how clients manage their money by providing innovative and reliable technology products and services as part of our ongoing commitment to democratize access to investing and financial planning.

The Director, Observability Principal & Architect is a senior individual contributor and enterprise technical leader responsible for defining and driving Schwab’s end-to-end observability architecture strategy across Schwab Technology Services. This position will establish the enterprise vision, architecture, standards, and implementation patterns for unified telemetry, including metrics, logs, traces, and events, across data center and cloud environments.

This role will provide a single, authoritative source of architectural leadership for the Observability Engineering portfolio. The Director will define a north-star architecture, establish reference implementations, make critical cross-platform design decisions, and align platform, infrastructure, service, application, and reliability engineering teams around a cohesive enterprise observability strategy.

This individual will combine enterprise architecture leadership with deep technical expertise and practical implementation experience. This individual will bridge strategy and execution, helping ensure that observability is embedded by design throughout the technology lifecycle and that solutions are secure, scalable, supportable, sustainable, and aligned with Schwab’s strategic objectives.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Observability Strategy and Architecture

• Define, communicate, and evolve the target-state architecture and multi-year technology strategy for enterprise observability across data center, cloud, platform, service, and application environments.
• Establish a unified telemetry architecture encompassing metrics, logs, traces, and events.
• Develop enterprise observability principles, standards, reference architectures, reusable design patterns, and reference implementations.
• Ensure observability is incorporated by design across the service lifecycle rather than implemented as a separate operational capability.
• Translate strategic objectives into actionable platform roadmaps, architectural priorities, transition states, and implementation guidance.
• Maintain a cohesive architectural direction as the observability portfolio, technical dependencies, and enterprise adoption continue to expand.
• Evaluate industry trends, emerging technologies, and architectural approaches that could strengthen Schwab’s observability capabilities.

Platform and Telemetry Architecture

• Architect core observability platform capabilities aligned to the firm’s enterprise technology strategy, including scalable and resilient telemetry collection, processing, transport, storage, enrichment, correlation, analysis, visualization, and retention.
• Define standard patterns for telemetry instrumentation, collection agents, application and infrastructure integrations, APIs, event streaming, and data pipelines to support consistent adoption across platforms and services.
• Establish architecture approaches that enable interoperability across observability platforms, reduce fragmented or duplicative telemetry implementations, and support highly available, mission-critical distributed systems.
• Provide architectural direction for platform availability, resiliency, performance, capacity, and recoverability while partnering with engineering teams to validate designs, assess tradeoffs, troubleshoot complex issues, and guide implementation decisions.

Architecture Governance and Standards

• Lead architecture governance, technical design reviews, technology assessments, and cross-platform architecture decisions for observability capabilities.
• Define and govern enterprise standards for telemetry generation, naming, tagging, metadata, schemas, quality, routing, retention, access, lifecycle management, and end-to-end telemetry governance.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture, peer architects, engineering leaders, product teams, infrastructure, and cybersecurity teams to align observability designs with enterprise standards and business requirements.

Cloud, Data, and Integration Architecture

• Define observability architecture patterns for hybrid data center and cloud environments, including cloud-native, distributed, event-driven, containerized, and service-oriented approaches where appropriate.
• Establish scalable telemetry data and integration architectures across applications, infrastructure platforms, cloud services, telemetry pipelines, and observability tools, covering ingestion, transport, enrichment, storage, querying, retention, and visibility.
• Partner stakeholders to ensure telemetry solutions meet enterprise requirements for governance, scalability, availability, performance, operational support, cost control, and long-term technology alignment.

Automation and Engineering Excellence

• Define reusable architecture patterns for observability platform provisioning, configuration, integration, policy enforcement, automation, and operational workflows.
• Champion modern engineering practices, including infrastructure as code, CI/CD, automated testing, security by design, policy as code, reliability engineering, and standardized support models.

Technical Leadership and Enterprise Influence

• Serve as the principal observability architecture authority, connecting long-term strategy with near-term engineering execution.
• Communicate architecture strategy, risks, decisions, roadmaps, and tradeoffs clearly to executive, architecture, product, engineering, and operations audiences.
• Build alignment, mentor technical leaders, and influence cross-organizational adoption of enterprise observability standards and reusable patterns.

What you have

To ensure that we have fulfilled our promise of "challenging the status quo," this role has specific qualifications that successful candidates should have.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 15 or more years of progressive experience in software engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure engineering, solution architecture, or enterprise architecture.
• Significant experience defining architecture strategy for large-scale, highly available, mission-critical enterprise technology platforms.
• Demonstrated experience designing distributed systems and platforms operating across hybrid data center and cloud environments.
• Deep knowledge of modern observability concepts, including metrics, logs, distributed tracing, events, telemetry pipelines, instrumentation, correlation, visualization, alerting, and service health.
• Experience defining enterprise standards, reference architectures, reusable patterns, and technical roadmaps.
• Strong understanding of telemetry data architecture, including collection, transport, enrichment, storage, querying, retention, access, and lifecycle management.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Azure and with cloud-native technologies such as containers and Kubernetes.
• Strong understanding of APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures, streaming technologies, distributed systems, and enterprise integration patterns.
• Experience leading platform modernization, architecture governance, complex design reviews, and cross-organizational technology initiatives.
• Knowledge of security by design, data protection, identity and access management, cybersecurity controls, and technology risk management.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate architecture strategy, decisions, and risks to both executive and technical audiences.
• Demonstrated ability to influence organizational boundaries and build alignment among architecture, product, engineering, infrastructure, security, data, and operational teams.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers, architects, and technical leaders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with OpenTelemetry or comparable vendor-neutral instrumentation and telemetry standards.
• Experience with Kafka or comparable event-streaming technologies.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, configuration automation, CI/CD pipelines, and policy-driven platform engineering.
• Experience designing platform capabilities for internal engineering consumers in a shared-services or platform-product model.
• Familiarity with FinOps principles and the management of telemetry volume, utilization, retention, and cost.
• Familiarity with AI and machine-learning capabilities that support engineering productivity, telemetry analysis, operational insights, or incident investigation.
• Experience working in a large, regulated enterprise environment.
• Experience in the financial services industry.
• Enterprise architecture, cloud architecture, Kubernetes, Site Reliability Engineering, or related technical certifications.

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