Sr Manager, Architect Lead

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 Sr. Solution Architect to join the Fixed Income Trading team. This individual should have a passion to architect innovative solutions, ability to simplify complex business requirements and design to deliver an end-to-end technology solution is key to success in this role.

Fixed Income aka Schwab Bond Source team provides a comprehensive Fixed Income trading platform to Schwab's internal and external clients (schwab.com, Schwab Advisor Center) as well as external dealer and regulatory agency systems. The team's mission is to deliver the best in class trading experience to Schwab's internal and external clients. Our goal is to deliver, high security, high availability and excellent customer service by ensuring the three systems are well maintained and continuously enhanced to meet the needs of our clients. 

As a Fixed Income Architect, you will guide enterprise-scale modernization across legacy platforms, distributed systems, and public cloud. Partnering with Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, and SRE teams, you will shape architecture direction, accelerate cloud adoption, and ensure solutions meet enterprise standards for security, resilience, governance, and regulatory compliance.

Key Responsibilities:

Solution Architecture & Problem Solving

• Define the target architecture and multi-year technology roadmap for Fixed Income platforms, aligning design decisions and governance with business priorities, operating models, regulatory requirements, and enterprise standards.

Technical Delivery & Execution

• Simplify and modernize the application portfolio with scalable, resilient cloud-native architectures and engineering practices that strengthen delivery, security, reliability, and operations.

Technical Leadership & Standards

• Mentor engineers through hands-on technical leadership, establishing consistent design standards, reusable patterns, and guardrails through code reviews and guidance.

Innovation & Knowledge Enablement

• Evaluate and recommend technologies, frameworks, languages, messaging patterns, and data-storage models, sharing guidance to support informed decisions across teams.

AI-Driven Engineering Leadership

• Guide responsible adoption of AI-enabled engineering tools and practices in line with delivery goals, security, regulatory requirements, and enterprise standards.

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

• 10+ years of progressive experience in application architecture, building low-latency enterprise trading platforms and leading complex initiatives.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Hands-on experience with Java, Spring Boot, RESTful APIs, SQL and NoSQL databases, and data modeling.
• Proven ability to define enterprise architecture strategies and modernize large-scale, mission-critical platforms in complex, regulated environments, including application rationalization and technology simplification.
• Strong expertise in cloud architecture, distributed systems, APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, and enterprise integration patterns, with experience migrating legacy applications to cloud platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Deep knowledge of Apache Kafka and distributed systems principles, including scalability, resiliency, fault tolerance, consistency, asynchronous processing, and performance optimization.
• Expertise in QuickFIX engines, the FIX protocol, RTTM regulatory reporting systems, and fixed-income trading.
• Experience guiding teams in adopting AI-enabled software development practices across the product lifecycle, including tools such as GitHub Copilot and agentic workflows, with an emphasis on responsible use and improved delivery speed, quality, reliability, and productivity.

AI Enablement & Developer Productivity:

• Demonstrated experience using GitHub Copilot and other AI-assisted development tools to accelerate coding, improve code quality, and streamline delivery workflows.
• Champion the adoption of AI-driven development practices across engineering teams, driving measurable improvements in productivity and efficiency.
• Educate and mentor teams on effective and responsible use of AI tools, including prompt engineering, code validation, and security considerations.
• Identify and implement practical use cases for AI across the software development lifecycle (e.g., code generation, testing, documentation, and troubleshooting).
• Establish best practices and governance for AI-assisted development to ensure accuracy, maintainability, and compliance with enterprise standards.
• Continuously evaluate emerging AI technologies and integrate them into engineering workflows to enable faster execution and innovation at scale.

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