Architect Lead

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.

The Schwab Capacity Planning Team, within the Application Architecture team, is looking for a Sr
Manager, Architect Lead with a Solution Architecture and Infrastructure Capacity Planning background
who is passionate about ensuring the capacity, availability, and resiliency of critical applications and
infrastructure to ensure that clients can transact anytime through the channels of their choice. Working
across business and technological domains, this role will drive application capacity strategy across a
wide variety of activities such as public cloud adoption, acquisitions and integrations, application
modernization, and digital enablement.

The Sr Manager, Architect Lead role at Schwab is a key position requiring senior technology expertise,
representing the best technical talent in the firm and best practices in the industry. Architects form a
community of technology leadership at Schwab and are critically influential in driving technology
strategy and guidance within their teams and across the enterprise.

This role reports to the Office of the CTO, chartered to establish technology governance, standards,
practices, and strategy for the entire firm, enabling thousands of technologists to better serve the
millions of Schwab clients and trillions of dollars in client assets. The role requires close collaboration
with architects and engineers across the Schwab Technology Services (STS) organization.

Specific goals will include:
• Map key business transactions (KBTs) and critical infrastructure components, assess the current
capacity baseline, and overlay current vs. proposed demand and capacity to meet business
needs.
• Provide guidance and standards in the design and implementation of robust, scalable, reliable,
and highly available systems.
• Drive development of monitoring and alerting capabilities to help predict capacity and
performance issues based on past trends; use data-driven approaches and analytics to correlate
business metrics and client expectations, new environments, and market conditions into
insights.
• Partner with Infrastructure & Operations (I&O), Cloud, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), and
Strategy & Business Management (SBM) organizations within STS to capture business,
application, and infrastructure metrics for capacity assessment and translate those into
infrastructure needs.
• Translate the impact of capacity issues into business performance measures and assist in the
reporting of risks and insights.
• Scale capacity planning practices beyond KBTs and critical infrastructure components and
strengthen the community of practice for application and infrastructure architecture at Schwab
in collaboration with architects across STS.

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

• B.S./B.A. in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a statistical or other quantitative
field is minimally required.

Classification: Schwab Internal• 8+ years of progressive experience in application architecture, design, and development, hosting
and maintaining complex and highly scalable systems.
• 7+ years of working experience with databases (e.g., SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc.).
• 5+ years of domain knowledge and experience with KBTs or applications and platforms
associated with KBTs.
• 5+ years of experience as an architect lead or lead engineer in solutioning and maintenance
architecture using a wide range of technical stacks, such as the Python data science stack
(Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, Jupyter, etc.) and the full Java development stack.
• 5+ years of experience with problem solving, root cause analysis and business impact analysis
for incidents related to capacity and scalability, as well as performing application health
assessments for application areas considered at risk for capacity and scalability.
• 4+ years of experience in architecting and designing systems for optimized scaling and
performance.
• 4+ years of experience with data mining, business intelligence, analytics, and visualization tools
(e.g., Tableau, Power BI) and data frameworks.
• 4+ years of experience with monitoring and alerting tools (Grafana, Datadog), automation of
tools and scripts to streamline processes and manual intervention, including infrastructure as
code (IaC).
• 4+ years of experience working effectively at all levels of an organization, with the ability to
influence and inspire others and lead decisions that provide clear, positive results to the
company.
• 3+ years of experience leading or working in a center of excellence team for architecture.
• 3+ years of experience in cloud (public or private) native design, including event-driven
applications, configuration and deployment strategies, and security and performance tuning of
large data streams and APIs.
• 2+ years of experience in cloud (GCP, AWS, Azure) native design, including microservices,
containers, event-driven applications, configuration and deployment strategies, and security
and performance tuning of large data streams and APIs.
• 2+ years of experience curating architectural principles, guidance, and governing architecture
based on established principles.
• 2+ years of experience with AI/ML models, tools and technologies, including AI-assisted
developer tools such as GitHub Copilot, Copilot Chat, Claude Code, Cursor, and similar tools.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science.
• Experience in financial services, investment management, and securities markets.
• Exceptional communication skills and the ability to communicate and collaborate appropriately
at all levels of the organization. This includes written and verbal communication, as well as
visualizations.
• Strong interpersonal skills, with the ability to navigate organizational boundaries across
architecture, engineering, and operations.
• Great team player with a startup and agile mindset (minimum viable product, learn-it-all,
adaptable to change, flexible in wearing different hats temporarily as needs arise) to drive
outcomes.
• Understanding and practical experience with industry-standard capacity planning, capacity
management processes, and SRE practices.

Classification: Schwab Internal• Enterprise-wide awareness of business domains in relation to core business processes,
capabilities, and enabling technology platforms.
• Experience in machine learning, operations research, and developing descriptive, predictive,
prescriptive, and anomaly detection data modeling techniques.
• Strong experience and engagement in DevOps, continuous integration, testing, data center,
deployment architecture, and business capability modeling.
• Experience transforming detailed architectural views into solutions for critical business
functions.
• Hands-on experience with data warehouses and cloud databases is a plus.
• Track record of maintaining stakeholder business knowledge, goals, and annual objectives to
anticipate business needs.

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