Investments Principal Data Architect

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.

The Principal Architect – SAMDA Platform is the senior technical authority accountable for the architecture, technical strategy, and long‑term evolution of the SAMDA platform. This role sets the architectural vision, engineering standards, and design guardrails that govern how the platform is built, operated, and scaled across SAM Data.

The Principal Architect owns the target‑state architecture and platform patterns that enable secure, resilient, and compliant delivery of critical regulatory and operational data capabilities. This includes defining how data domains, pipelines, consumption layers, and platform services are designed and integrated across Custody, Investment, Accounting, and reference data domains.

Operating across platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, data architecture, security, governance, and production operations, the role ensures architectural consistency, production stability, and long‑term sustainability. The Principal Architect enables federated teams to move faster through clear standards and reusable patterns, while ensuring the platform meets strict reliability, risk, and regulatory expectations.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Architecture & Technical Strategy

• Own and evolve the enterprise target‑state architecture for the SAMDA platform.
• Define and maintain architecture principles, reference designs, and non‑functional standards covering scalability, resiliency, performance, security, and cost efficiency.
• Serve as the technical authority for platform‑level design decisions, architectural reviews, and complex cross‑domain integrations.
• Ensure architectural decisions support long‑term business, regulatory, and operational objectives.
  
  

Cloud, Data & Platform Engineering Leadership

• Architect and govern core platform capabilities, including:
• Ingestion and file‑delivery frameworks
• Data governance capabilities
• CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation
• Platform observability, monitoring, and alerting
• Ensure the platform supports iterative delivery models while maintaining production‑grade reliability.
• Drive architectural consistency across environments, repositories, and delivery pipelines.
  

Security, Risk & Data Governance

• Partner with Compliance, Data Governance and Data Product Owner teams to embed:
• Information barriers and role‑based access controls
• Data classification, tagging, and lineage standards
• Secure access patterns and auditability
• Ensure all platform designs comply with enterprise risk, security, and governance requirements.
• Promote a “secure‑by‑design” and “governance‑by‑default” architecture mindset.
  

Operational Excellence & Platform Reliability

• Define and own platform stability metrics, SLAs, and availability standards.
• Architect production readiness practices, resiliency patterns, and disaster recovery strategies.
• Partner with Cloud SRE and Production Support to:
• Reduce incident frequency and severity
• Improve mean time to detect and resolve issues
• Enable predictable, controlled platform releases
  

Patterns, Standards & Federated Enablement

• Establish reusable platform patterns for ingestion, data quality, security, and consumption.
• Drive standardization and simplification to reduce onboarding time for new teams and domains.
• Enable federated delivery models by providing clear architectural guardrails while preserving team autonomy.
• Continuously evolve standards as the platform scales and matures.
  
  

AI‑Enabled Engineering & Platform Intelligence

• Define and govern an AI‑enabled engineering strategy that enhances developer productivity, platform reliability, and data quality within a regulated enterprise environment.
• Establish architectural patterns for applying AI/ML to:
• Automated data quality and anomaly detection
• Intelligent monitoring and SLA‑aware alerting
• Assisted root‑cause analysis for production incidents
• Enable AI‑assisted engineering workflows (e.g., design validation, code review assistance, pipeline diagnostics, documentation generation) with strong security, audit, and access controls.
• Partner with Data Science, Platform Engineering, and Cloud SRE teams to identify high‑value, low‑risk AI use cases.
• Ensure AI‑enabled capabilities are secure, explainable, auditable, and governed under existing enterprise frameworks.
• Influence platform evolution by ensuring strong metadata, observability, lineage, and telemetry foundations to support future AI use.
  

Technical Leadership & Influence

• Act as a technical mentor and role model for senior engineers, tech leads, and architects.
• Lead architecture forums, platform working groups, and design reviews.
• Translate complex business and regulatory needs into scalable, durable technical solutions.
• Communicate architectural decisions clearly to engineering, leadership, and risk stakeholders.
  
  

What you have

Required Qualifications

• 15 years of experience in enterprise platform architecture, data architecture, or large‑scale distributed systems, with a demonstrated progression into principal‑level or enterprise‑wide technical leadership roles.
• Proven experience successfully architecting, building, and scaling enterprise data or platform capabilities at large Asset Management firms, investment managers, or complex financial services organizations, operating under strict regulatory, risk, and operational constraints.
• Demonstrated ownership of end‑to‑end platform lifecycle, including:
• Target‑state architecture definition
• Platform build‑out and production go‑live
• Operational stabilization and scale
• Long‑term platform evolution without disruptive re‑architecture
• Strong experience designing platforms that support mission‑critical regulatory and operational workloads, with clear accountability for availability, resiliency, and data correctness.
• Deep understanding of federated delivery models in large financial institutions, including how to balance centralized platform standards with domain team autonomy.
• Proven ability to operate effectively within enterprise governance frameworks, including security reviews, risk approvals, architecture boards, and compliance processes common to large financial institutions.
• Demonstrated success influencing architecture and engineering outcomes across multiple teams and organizations, without direct line management authority.
• Strong executive‑level communication skills, with the ability to:
• Articulate architectural trade‑offs clearly
• Defend design decisions with data and reasoning
• Align senior technology and business stakeholders around long‑term platform strategy
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience as a Principal Architect, Principal Engineer, or Enterprise Architect at a large Asset Management firm, investment manager, or tier‑1 financial services organization, with demonstrated impact at enterprise scale.
• Hands‑on experience modernizing or operating core data or platform capabilities that support portfolio management, investment operations, accounting, custody, or regulatory reporting.
• Proven track record of leading platforms through multi‑year transformation journeys, including legacy modernization, cloud migration, or data platform consolidation.
• Experience working within highly regulated environments, with strong familiarity navigating security, risk, compliance, and architecture governance forums.
• Demonstrated success defining and enforcing platform standards and architectural guardrails across federated engineering teams.
• Experience influencing senior technology and business leaders on platform strategy, investment trade‑offs, and long‑term architectural direction.
• Exposure to AI‑enabled engineering or intelligent platform capabilities (e.g., data quality automation, observability, operational analytics) in a regulated enterprise context.
• Strong understanding of data governance, metadata management, lineage, and operational monitoring as foundational platform capabilities.
  
  

What’s in it for you

At Schwab, you’re empowered to shape your future. We champion your growth through meaningful work, continuous learning, and a culture of trust and collaboration—so you can build the skills to make a lasting impact. Our Hybrid Work and Flexibility approach balances our ongoing commitment to workplace flexibility, serving our clients, and our strong belief in the value of being together in person on a regular basis.

We offer a competitive benefits package that takes care of the whole you – both today and in the future:

• 401(k) with company match and Employee stock purchase plan
• Paid time for vacation, volunteering, and 28-day sabbatical after every 5 years of service for eligible positions
• Paid parental leave and family building benefits
• Tuition reimbursement
• Health, dental, and vision insurance