Director, Architect Principal - Workplace Services Engineering

Charles Schwab Inc.•Southlake, TX

6d•$221,000 - $252,000•Onsite

About The Position

The Principal Architect, Stock Plan Technology is the senior technology leader responsible for defining and driving the platform’s architectural vision, modernization strategy, Site Reliability Engineering, and target-state technology roadmap. Stock Plan Technology is part of Workplace Services Engineering and supports platforms and applications for Schwab’s corporate equity compensation business, including employee stock plan administration, employee trading monitoring, and regulatory compliance. The role partners with business leaders, product teams, enterprise architects, and engineering organizations to align technology investments with business objectives and enterprise standards. It leads modernization from legacy, tightly coupled systems toward scalable, modular, API-first, cloud-native, and event-driven architectures while maintaining business continuity. The position also advances system reliability and operational excellence, promotes modern engineering and software delivery practices, and provides technical leadership and coaching across architecture and engineering teams. Schwab states that it believes in in-office collaboration and intends for the selected candidate to work on site in the specified location(s). The role is eligible for bonus or incentive opportunities in addition to the salary range; no salary range is provided.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical discipline.
15+ years of progressive technology experience, including at least 5 years in a Solution, Enterprise, or Principal Architect capacity within financial services.
Proven experience leading large-scale legacy platform modernization, including decomposing monolithic Oracle/PLSQL or mainframe systems into cloud-native microservices, event-driven, and API-first architectures.
Deep expertise across application, data, integration, and infrastructure architecture, with hands-on proficiency in Java/Spring Boot, REST APIs, Oracle and PostgreSQL, NoSQL/distributed databases, and Kafka or MQ.
Strong working knowledge of AWS, Azure, or GCP; cloud-native design patterns; Docker/Kubernetes; CI/CD pipelines; and Infrastructure-as-Code for regulated financial workloads.
Fluency in relevant financial services regulatory and compliance frameworks, including SOX, SEC Rule 17a-4, FINRA recordkeeping, IRS Sections 409A/423/422, GDPR/CCPA, and PCI-DSS, and the ability to embed controls into solution designs.
Demonstrated leadership in enterprise architecture governance, standards, and reference architectures, partnering with engineering, product, risk, and cybersecurity teams on scalable, resilient, highly available mission-critical systems.
Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, including the ability to influence executives, business partners, and technical teams by explaining architectural concepts as business outcomes and trade-offs.
Practical expertise in observability, resilience engineering, and capacity planning, with proven delivery in production environments.
Experience using AI tools to address reliability problems such as anomaly detection, incident triage, noise reduction, postmortem acceleration, capacity forecasting, or auto-remediation and repetitive operational toil.
In-depth knowledge of resilience patterns such as circuit breakers, timeouts, and retries, and how to design and implement them.
In-depth knowledge of CI/CD processes and tools and safe software deployment strategies such as blue/green deployments, canary deployments, and feature toggles.

Nice To Haves

Certifications such as TOGAF, AWS/Azure Professional Architect, CISSP, or SAFe Architect.
Experience architecting end-to-end equity compensation, stock plan administration, brokerage, or wealth management solutions, including recordkeeping, vesting, tax withholding, corporate actions, and participant servicing workflows.
Experience at a major financial institution or fintech serving equity plan participants, with familiarity in issuer-side workflows, recordkeeping, broker integrations, and participant experience platforms.
Hands-on exposure to AI/GenAI-driven modernization, including LLM-based legacy-code reverse engineering, automated requirements extraction, intelligent document processing, and human-in-the-loop agentic workflows.
Experience with Domain-Driven Design, event-driven architecture, CQRS, and strangler-fig patterns for incrementally retiring legacy systems while sustaining business continuity.
Familiarity with data mesh, lakehouse, streaming ETL, CDC, and cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, or Redshift for analytics, reporting, and regulatory reconciliation.
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, including brokerage clearing/settlement, custody, tax lot accounting, corporate actions processing, and open finance/API ecosystems.
Experience evaluating vendors and managing strategic partners for SaaS/COTS platforms, system integrators, and emerging fintech providers in the equity compensation and wealth ecosystem.

Responsibilities

Partner with platform architects, enterprise architects, and engineering teams to define and evolve current- and future-state architectures aligned with platform 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.
Partner with Engineering, SRE, and Operations teams to improve system stability, availability, observability, performance, disaster recovery readiness, and operational excellence.
Translate 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.
Provide technical leadership and coaching to architects, engineering leaders, and technical leads; cultivate architecture excellence and build reusable modernization frameworks.