Director, Architect Principal

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).

Workplace Services Engineering (WSE) is an organization within Schwab Technology Services that is embarking on a major transformation. We support Workplace Services, and we’re shaping the future of how people experience financial well‑being at work. We partner with leading employers to deliver innovative retirement, equity, and workplace financial solutions that help millions of participants build stronger financial futures. This is a fast‑growing, high‑impact business where scale meets purpose—where your work directly influences how people plan, save, invest, and succeed.  

As a key growth engine for the firm, we’re investing more than ever to expand our capabilities, modernize platforms, and elevate the experiences we deliver to employers and their employees. Our teams work at the intersection of technology, service, and financial expertise—supporting workplace clients with solutions that scale, adapt, and deliver meaningful outcomes. Here, your ideas help shape what’s next for workplace financial services. If you’re energized by solving complex problems, collaborating across disciplines, and making a real difference in the workplace services industry, you’ll find your place here.

Stock Plan Technology (SPT) is part of Workplace Services Engineering and organization is responsible for the platforms and applications that support Schwab's corporate equity compensation business. These platforms enable clients to administer employee stock plans while also providing the technology needed to monitor employee trading activity and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements.

The Principal Architect, Stock Plan Technology serves as the senior technology leader responsible for defining and driving the architectural vision, modernization strategy, Site Reliability Engineering and target-state technology roadmap for the platform. This individual partners closely with business leaders, product teams, enterprise architects, and engineering organizations to ensure technology investments align with business objectives and enterprise standards.

Key Responsibilities:

• Partner with platform architects, enterprise architects, and engineering teams to define and evolve current- and future-state architectures, ensuring alignment across platforms and business priorities.
• Drive architectural decisions for transitioning monolithic, tightly coupled systems to scalable, modular, API-first, cloud-native, and event-driven architectures while minimizing business disruption.
• Create and enforce architectural principles, reference architectures, design patterns, engineering guardrails, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), and governance processes across modernization initiatives.
• Partner with Engineering, SRE, and Operations teams to improve system stability, availability, observability, performance, disaster recovery readiness, and operational excellence throughout the modernization journey.
• Translate complex technical strategies into business outcomes, influence investment decisions, secure executive alignment, and communicate modernization progress, risks, and value realization to senior stakeholders.
• Champion DevSecOps, CI/CD, automation, cloud engineering, platform engineering, AI-assisted development, and modern software delivery practices to improve speed, quality, and scalability.
• Provide technical leadership and coaching to architects, engineering leaders, and technical leads; cultivate architecture excellence; and build repeatable modernization frameworks that can be leveraged across multiple business domains.

What you have

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline, with 15+ years of progressive technology experience including a minimum of 5+ years in a Solution/Enterprise/Principal Architect capacity within financial services
• Proven track record leading large-scale legacy platform modernization programs, including decomposition of monolithic Oracle/PLSQL or mainframe systems into cloud-native microservices, event-driven, and API-first architectures.
• Deep expertise across multiple architecture domains — application, data, integration, and infrastructure — with hands-on proficiency in Java/Spring Boot, REST APIs, relational (Oracle, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL/distributed databases, and messaging/streaming technologies (Kafka, MQ).
• Strong working knowledge of public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including cloud-native design patterns, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure-as-Code for regulated financial workloads.
• Fluency in financial services regulatory and compliance frameworks relevant to brokerage and equity compensation (SOX, SEC Rule 17a-4, FINRA recordkeeping, IRS Section 409A/423/422, GDPR/CCPA, PCI-DSS) and the ability to embed controls into solution designs.
• Demonstrated leadership in driving enterprise architecture governance, standards, and reference architectures, partnering with engineering, product, risk, and cybersecurity teams to deliver scalable, resilient, and highly available mission-critical systems.  
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, with proven ability to influence C-suite executives, business partners, and technical teams by translating complex architectural concepts into clear business outcomes and trade-offs
• Deep practical expertise across observability, resilience engineering, and capacity planning, not just familiarity, but proven delivery in production environments.
• Demonstrated experience using AI tools to solve real reliability problems: anomaly detection, incident triage, noise reduction, postmortem acceleration, capacity forecasting, or auto-remediation and reduce repetitive operational toil.
• In-depth knowledge of resilience patterns (i.e. circuit breakers, timeouts, retries, etc.) and how to design and implement them.
• In-depth knowledge of CI/CD processes and tools to ensure software is delivered safely using known deployment strategies (i.e. blue/green, canary deployments, feature toggles, etc.).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Industry certifications such as TOGAF, AWS/Azure Professional Architect, CISSP, or SAFe Architect.
• Demonstrated experience architecting end-to-end solutions for equity compensation, stock plan administration, brokerage, or wealth management platforms, including recordkeeping, vesting, tax withholding, corporate actions, and participant servicing workflows.
• Prior experience at a major financial institution or fintech serving equity plan participants, with familiarity in issuer-side workflows, record keeping, broker integrations, and participant experience platforms.
• Hands-on exposure to AI/GenAI-driven modernization techniques, including LLM-based reverse engineering of legacy code, automated requirements extraction, intelligent document processing, and human-in-the-loop agentic workflows.
• Experience with Domain-Driven Design (DDD), event-driven architecture, CQRS, and strangler-fig patterns for incrementally retiring legacy systems while sustaining business continuity  
• Familiarity with modern data architecture paradigms like data mesh, lakehouse, streaming ETL, CDC, and cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift)  for analytics, reporting, and regulatory reconciliation use cases.
• Proven success leading geographically distributed, cross-functional teams of architects, engineers, and product owners in Agile/SAFe environments, including mentoring senior technical talent and building communities of practice.
• Working knowledge of adjacent capital markets and wealth domains, brokerage clearing/settlement, custody, tax lot accounting, corporate actions processing, and open finance/API ecosystems  to drive integrated platform strategies
• Track record of vendor evaluation and strategic partner management for SaaS/COTS platforms, system integrators, and emerging fintech providers in the equity compensation and wealth ecosystem.

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