Director, Software Development and Engineering (PL)

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..

We are looking for a Director of Software Engineering to join the Trading team that builds and runs high throughput, low latency trading applications. The role will be part of our Sprint based Agile teams playing a dual role supporting the existing Trading platform while building out cloud target architecture and efficiently modernize applications in fast-paced environment. You will design, build, and deploy Schwab’s next generation trading platform. We work hard and have fun in what we do!

 We seek a transformation leader who combines strategic clarity, execution discipline, and the ability to drive change at scale. A proven track record of establishing AI-first teams and consistently delivering high-quality technology products and services in fast-paced, growth-focused settings is crucial for success in this position.

Key Responsibilities

• AI‑Driven Engineering Transformation: Lead the transformation of an established engineering organization from legacy, manual development practices to a GenAI‑first, agentic SDLC. Treat AI as a core production capability, not a side experiment—used across design, development, testing, modernization, documentation, and operations.
• Technology & Architecture leadership: Develop, lead, and execute a multi-year, enterprise-wide transformation strategy spanning multiple broker-dealer domains, aligning architecture, data, and platforms into unified target state architecture.
• Transformation Execution: Migrate legacy broker-dealer systems to modern architecture while executing structured legacy decommissioning plans, including system retirement, data migration, and cost/complexity reduction.
• Legacy Retirement Ownership: Define and execute a clear strategy for decommissioning legacy systems, including reverse engineering, domain decomposition, data migration, and measurable reduction of technical debt and operational risk
• Production Support & Operational Resiliency: Own production support outcomes for critical broker-dealer platforms, ensuring high availability, incident readiness, rapid issue resolution, effective root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement across monitoring, alerting, runbooks, release readiness, and operational controls.
• Stakeholder Management: Liaise with senior leadership and functional heads to align system capabilities with business goals, managing expectations and priorities across the organization.
• Vendor Strategy & Management: Evaluate, select, and manage relationships with key IT services vendors and third-party product vendors.
• Team Leadership: Lead cross-functional teams of IT professionals across multiple countries, fostering a high-performance culture aligned with the new technical operating model. 
• Execution Focus: Demonstrated ability to operationalize strategy and deliver complex, multi-year programs on time and within budget.
• Talent Management: Passionate and proven ability to identify, mentor, and develop technical and managerial talent at scale.
• Communication: Outstanding executive-level written and verbal communication skills.

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

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, or a related field. 
• Experience: 10+ years in managing broker-dealer systems with a focus on system transformation.
• Domain Expertise: Deep understanding of broker-dealer capabilities and operations.
• Transformation Leadership: Proven track record of leading large-scale, complex technology projects from conception to implementation.
• Technical Acumen: Broad and deep knowledge of IT/software technologies and trends, domain knowledge and experience in infrastructure support, application development, and cloud-based application development, web services, middleware, operating systems, databases, networking, and security. Own AI-first delivery across the SDLC, including use of generative and agentic AI for legacy system understanding, requirements analysis, automated testing, code modernization, and production operations—with clear, measurable improvements in velocity, quality, and cost.
• Production Operations:Demonstrated experience leading production support for business-critical financial services platforms, including incident management, problem management, service restoration, operational risk reduction, resiliency practices, and partnership with business, operations, risk, compliance, and infrastructure teams.
• Leadership Skills:Proven ability to build and lead high-performing, globally distributed teams in a fast-paced environment. Proven experience transforming teams from legacy, mainframe-centric ways of working to modern, distributed engineering practices by leading large-scale adoption of generative and agentic AI as a primary transformation lever, not an augmentation—redefining engineering productivity, system design, and delivery practices.
• Stakeholder Management: Proven track record of managing stakeholders through influence and setting appropriate expectations and holding them accountable to ensure faster delivery to market.

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