Director, Principal Platform Architect

Charles Schwab Inc.•Austin, TX

1d•$206,000 - $249,000•Onsite

About The Position

Schwab Technology Services is seeking a senior individual-contributor to shape resilient, scalable, and intelligent enterprise platforms. The role combines deep technical expertise with enterprise leadership and influences architecture strategy across mission-critical technology environments. The architect will define target-state architectures, guide major platform decisions, and translate strategy into practical roadmaps and measurable outcomes. The position emphasizes enterprise resiliency, batch processing, hosting platforms, and applied AI, alongside executive communication and stakeholder leadership. The selected candidate is expected to work on site in the specified location(s).

Requirements

12 or more years of progressive technology experience, including significant enterprise or solution architecture experience.
Demonstrated experience architecting mission-critical platforms with defined availability, recovery, observability, failure isolation, auditability, and operational ownership.
Deep experience in enterprise resiliency, including high availability, disaster recovery, dependency analysis, resilience testing, and operational readiness.
Experience with enterprise batch architecture, including scheduling, orchestration, dependencies, restart and recovery, monitoring, and modernization.
Broad knowledge of enterprise hosting technologies, including on-premises infrastructure, cloud, hybrid platforms, containers, virtualization, networking, storage, and identity.
Demonstrated ability to identify and apply AI capabilities to improve platform engineering, automation, resiliency, architecture, and operations.
Broad understanding of the infrastructure, data, integration, security, governance, observability, and lifecycle capabilities needed to support production AI solutions.
Experience developing pragmatic architecture roadmaps that address legacy constraints, operational dependencies, technology risk, and modernization priorities.
Demonstrated ability to lead complex architecture decisions and move solutions from concept through implementation.
Ability to present architecture strategies, risks, and recommendations clearly and concisely to executive audiences.
Strong stakeholder-management skills across organizations with different priorities, incentives, and constraints.
Demonstrated ability to resolve technical and organizational conflict constructively while maintaining effective working relationships.
Ability to challenge assumptions, surface risks early, and guide teams toward clear decisions, ownership, and next steps.
Comfort operating independently in ambiguous and evolving environments.
Ability to influence through technical credibility, structured thinking, partnership, and communication.

Nice To Haves

Experience in financial services or another highly regulated industry.
Experience with large-scale platform modernization, infrastructure migration, or resiliency programs.
Knowledge of public-cloud architecture, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, DevSecOps, and policy automation.
Advanced certification in cloud, infrastructure, security, resiliency, data, or AI.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

Define target-state architectures, reusable patterns, and transition roadmaps for mission-critical enterprise platforms.
Lead architecture decisions across resiliency, batch processing, enterprise hosting, and platform modernization.
Assess platforms for availability, recoverability, failure isolation, dependency management, observability, scalability, and operational readiness.
Guide modernization of enterprise batch environments, including workload orchestration, scheduling, dependencies, restart and recovery, and monitoring.
Evaluate workload-placement and hosting strategies across on-premises, cloud, hybrid, container, virtualized, and managed-platform environments.
Identify opportunities to apply AI to platform engineering and operations, including automation, observability, incident response, capacity management, operational analytics, architecture decision support, and developer productivity.
Define platform capabilities needed to support responsible AI adoption, including secure infrastructure, data access, integration, resiliency, governance, observability, and lifecycle management.
Translate complex technical options, risks, and tradeoffs into clear recommendations and actionable plans.
Lead cross-functional architecture reviews and guide solutions from strategy through implementation and operational ownership.
Mentor architects and engineers while creating reusable guidance that strengthens the broader architecture practice.