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(s).

The CET-Move Money team in builds secure, scalable, and resilient money movement capabilities enabling clients to transfer funds seamlessly and safely. As an Architect Lead (Role 59), you will own end-to-end architectural direction for high-volume, compliance-sensitive services, refactor legacy components, and shape platform strategy in partnership with product and senior leadership.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect distributed, scalable, event-driven, and highly available services on AWS, GCP, and PCF; apply cloud-native and microservices patterns.
• Define and evolve target state architectures; produce clear Software Architecture Documents and reference implementations.
• Lead architecture for Move Money Core Platform Services (secure transfers, orchestration, customization, throughput optimization).
• Drive strategic technology roadmaps; advocate for product vision and senior leadership priorities; influence investment decisions.
• Ensure transactional integrity, data consistency, auditability, fraud prevention hooks, and secure design (shift-left security).
• Address scalability, latency, resiliency, observability, and performance (including concurrency, back-pressure, and failure isolation).
• Mentor engineers; establish patterns, guardrails, and design review rigor.
• Recommend and evaluate frameworks, languages, messaging patterns, and storage models.
• Champion end-to-end monitoring, SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, and operational excellence (24x7 availability).
• Collaborate with product, compliance, risk, cyber security, and operations to align architecture with regulatory and business objectives.
• Introduce pragmatic AI/ML accelerators where they add measurable value.
• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders; drive consensus across teams.

What you have

Required Technical Qualifications

• 8+ years hands-on designing and implementing Spring Boot RESTful services ; PCF experience a plus.
• Architectural design experience in AWS, GCP; Terraform (infra-as-code) experience a plus.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) fundamentals (Compute, Storage, IAM) and multi-cloud architectural considerations.
• Advanced relational data modeling and performance tuning; strong understanding of transactional semantics.
• Messaging and integration expertise (RabbitMQ; event-driven patterns; idempotency; retry/backoff strategies).
• Cloud security principles (encryption, secrets management, least privilege, threat modeling, secure APIs, OWASP).
• High availability and resiliency engineering (circuit breakers, bulkheads, chaos readiness, DR strategies).
• DevOps tooling proficiency (Git, Bitbucket, Bamboo or equivalent CI/CD pipelines); automated build, test, deploy flows.
• Observability (logs, metrics, traces), defining SLIs/SLOs, and production readiness checklists.
• Agile/Scrum and continuous delivery adoption leadership.
• Proven delivery of mission-critical, client-facing 24x7 systems (payments, trading, or high-volume financial transactions).
• Bachelor's degree in CS, IT, Cyber Security, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred / Nice to Have

• AI/ML knowledge (concepts, model lifecycle, practical application for fraud detection, risk scoring, or operational insights).
• Experience with domain-driven design, data streaming, and event sourcing patterns.
• Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect certification.

Soft Skills & Leadership Competencies

• Strategic influence: shapes technical direction aligned with business and leadership goals.
• Executive communication: concise narrative framing of architectural trade-offs and ROI.
• Mentorship & talent development : elevates engineering quality through coaching and delegation.
• Cross-functional collaboration: strong partnership with product, risk, compliance, operations.
• Decision-making under ambiguity: structured evaluation of options balancing risk, speed, and scalability.
• Customer & security mindset: prioritizes safe, reliable client experiences and proactive risk mitigation.
• Adaptability: iterates architecture as regulatory, volume, or product demands evolve.
• Relationship building & stakeholder management: earns trust across varied audiences.

Impact Metrics

• Reduced latency and error rates in high-volume transfer workflows.
• Improved platform availability (SLO adherence) and faster incident MTTR.
• Accelerated feature delivery via reusable architectural patterns.
• Measurable risk reduction through enhanced security controls and observability.

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