Sr Manager, Software Development & Engineering Lead (PL)

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).

Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full time basis without employer sponsorship.

We are seeking a Sr. Manager, Software Development & Engineering (PL) to provide leadership for Schwab systems and infrastructure supporting the Cross‑Enterprise Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) organization. This role is accountable for defining direction and driving outcomes that ensure resiliency, scalability, availability, and compliance with Schwab security standards across critical platforms.

The Sr. Manager will establish and evolve enterprise operational best practices, processes, and tooling, with a strong focus on automation and early risk detection, ensuring high‑priority initiatives are executed with urgency and discipline. The ideal candidate is a confident people leader and strategic problem solver who communicates effectively, partners closely with stakeholders, and leads multiple concurrent initiatives while balancing business priorities and expectations. This role works in close partnership with application development, platform, and infrastructure teams to influence system design, production readiness, and reliability outcomes, with a strong emphasis on cloud‑native and microservices‑based architectures. The leader will provide oversight for automation strategies that reduce operational toil and enable scalable, reliable services for technology and business partners.

The organization is focused on continuously improving availability and performance of the client experience through modern platforms and technologies, including Python, observability and monitoring tools, microservices architectures, Cloud Foundry, and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), making this an exciting opportunity to lead enterprise‑scale reliability and modernization efforts.

What you’ll do:

Enterprise Leadership & Strategy

• Own the SRE and Automation vision, strategy, and multi‑year roadmap aligned to Schwab’s technology and business objectives.
• Lead and develop multiple SRE teams, including talent development, performance management, and succession planning.
• Establish and govern enterprise reliability standards, including SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and operational KPIs.
• Drive consistent engineering and operational maturity across platforms and portfolios.

SRE & Reliability Outcomes

• Be accountable for availability, performance, resiliency, and recoverability of enterprise systems.
• Set expectations and governance for incident management, escalation, and blameless post‑incident reviews, ensuring systemic improvements.
• Partner with Architecture and Engineering leaders to influence resilient system design, production readiness, and risk‑aware decision making.
• Lead capacity planning, resilience testing, and proactive risk mitigation for large‑scale distributed systems.

Automation‑First Operational Excellence

• Champion automation‑first and self‑service principles to reduce operational toil and improve consistency and speed.
• Drive investment in automated monitoring, alerting, remediation, deployment validation, and recovery.
• Establish standard automation patterns and platforms, with Python as a primary automation language and PowerShell where appropriate.
• Measure and continuously improve operational efficiency through automation and observability.

Google Cloud (GCP) Reliability Leadership

• Provide strategic leadership for reliability engineering across GCP‑hosted services and cloud migrations.
• Define cloud operational standards for monitoring, availability, security, and cost‑aware reliability.
• Partner with platform and cloud enablement teams to scale reliable cloud‑native practices.

Partnership with Development Teams

• Work closely with application development partners to embed SRE principles early in the SDLC.
• Influence development teams on operability, observability, scalability, and reliability tradeoffs.
• Ensure production insights and operational learnings are systematically fed back into product and platform design.
• Collaborate with Release Management to ensure safe, reliable, and predictable delivery.

Influence & Communication

• Act as a trusted advisor to senior technology and business leaders.
• Represent SRE leadership in enterprise governance, risk reviews, and executive forums.
• Drive alignment across organizations through influence rather than direct authority 

What you have

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field
• 8 - 10+ years of experience in software engineering, systems, or reliability engineering
• 5+ years of leadership experience, including leading managers and senior engineers
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms, and high‑availability architecture
• Demonstrated success driving SRE practices, automation, and operational excellence at enterprise scale
• Deep understanding of SDLC, Agile methodologies, DevOps, and production operations
• Proven ability to set direction, manage complexity, and deliver outcomes in a large organization
• Strong executive‑level communication and stakeholder management skills
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP) operations, migration, and reliability leadership
• Automation strategy and tooling using Python; PowerShell experience
• Observability platforms (Splunk, Grafana, AppDynamics, etc.)
• Event‑driven and message‑based architectures (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• NoSQL platforms (MongoDB, Aerospike)
• Versatile and Deep knowledge of Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Preferred Qualifications:

• Financial services or other highly regulated environments

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