Senior Security Engineer, Digital Asset Custody
About The Position
Charles Schwab is seeking a Lead Engineer to focus on security and custody architecture for their Crypto Custody engineering team. This role will serve as the technical authority for key management, custody security architecture, and risk posture across Schwab’s digital asset platforms. It is a hands-on, high-impact individual contributor role where the Lead Engineer will set technical direction, define custody architecture, and own critical design decisions related to HSMs, MPC, key storage, policy enforcement, disaster recovery, and incident response. The position requires strong engineering judgment in high-risk, high-trust environments, and the ability to operate with autonomy while influencing various teams, architects, security personnel, and leadership.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with deep specialization in security-sensitive or cryptographic systems.
- Strong hands-on experience with HSMs, MPC frameworks, and secure key management systems.
- Experience with Web3 Security tooling such as Slither, Mythril, Foundry Fuzzing.
- Experience with common cryptography implementation languages such as C, C++, Rust, Go.
- Experience with collaborating with security auditors, Ex: Trail of bits, halborn.
- Proven ability to design systems where failure has material risk implications.
- Strong grounding in distributed systems, secure architectures, and fault-tolerant design.
- Track record of acting as a technical authority without formal people management.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with crypto custody, digital asset platforms, or blockchain infrastructure.
- Prior ownership of incident response, DR design, or security runbooks.
- Ability to articulate risk-based trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Systems thinker who connects technology, security, policy, and operations.
- Comfortable challenging assumptions and raising concerns early in high-stakes environments.
- Experience applying AI tools to complex engineering workflows.
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and evolve institutional-grade key management architectures, including Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), Multi-Party Computation (MPC), and secure key generation, storage, rotation, signing, and recovery.
- Define architectural patterns and trade-offs for hot wallet, warm wallet, and cold storage models.
- Ensure cryptographic designs align with regulatory, security, and audit expectations.
- Partner with Cybersecurity and Risk to embed defense-in-depth and zero-trust principles into custody design.
- Lead the design of the Custody Policy Engine, governing authorization, approvals, limits, segregation of duties, transaction controls, exception handling, and policy versioning, auditability, and enforceability.
- Ensure policies are code-driven, deterministic, observable, and testable.
- Translate business, legal, and risk requirements into clear, enforceable technical controls.
- Serve as a trusted technical advisor on custody governance topics.
- Own custody-specific disaster recovery strategies, including key recovery, quorum loss scenarios, and chain events.
- Author and maintain incident response and recovery runbooks for custody-related failures or security events.
- Partner with Operations, Security, and SRE to ensure practicable, tested recovery procedures.
- Lead post-incident technical analysis, root cause reviews, and long-term remediation strategies.
- Act as the custody architecture authority, ensuring consistency across wallets, blockchains, environments, and platforms.
- Identify architectural and operational risks early and propose mitigation strategies with clear trade-offs.
- Ensure custody designs scale across assets, chains, and future tokenized products.
- Influence enterprise standards by raising the bar on security, resilience, and technical rigor.
- Leverage GenAI and agentic AI tools to accelerate architecture design, threat modeling, documentation, testing, and reviews.
- Set expectations for AI-assisted engineering rigor.
- Partner with engineering teams to raise architecture, code, and documentation quality across custody components.
Benefits
- In addition to the salary range, this role is also eligible for bonus or incentive opportunities.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
