Senior Engineering Manager - Platform Engineering (PL)

Pay range: USD $160,000.00 - $215,000.00 / Year

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).

Schwab Technology Services enables the future of how clients manage their money by providing innovative and reliable technology products and services as part of our ongoing commitment to democratize access to investing and financial planning.

The Senior Engineering Manager - Platform Engineering leads the design, delivery, and operation of shared technology platforms that power large-scale, client-facing digital applications across web, mobile, and API channels in a financial services environment. This role is responsible for enabling application teams to deliver features rapidly and safely by providing resilient, scalable, and secure platform capabilities that abstract infrastructure complexity and enforce enterprise standards by design.

You will lead and grow a team of platform engineers responsible for building enterprise-grade distributed systems, shared services, and developer enablement tooling. The role requires deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed applications on the .NET platform, along with the ability to guide architectural decisions, establish engineering standards, and ensure platforms are designed for performance, reliability, and regulatory compliance.

As a senior leader, you will own the platform roadmap, balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term architectural evolution. You will partner closely with application engineering, product, security, and operations teams to support cloud adoption, modernization initiatives, and operational excellence. The platform is expected to scale with client growth while meeting strict availability, security, and governance requirements.

The role also emphasizes Cloud and AI enablement, including the responsible adoption of AI-assisted engineering and operational capabilities to improve developer productivity, automation, and system insight. You will ensure these capabilities are introduced with appropriate guardrails, observability, and risk controls suitable for a regulated enterprise.

As a people leader, you will build a high-performing engineering culture focused on ownership, continuous improvement, and technical excellence. You will coach and develop engineers and senior technical leaders, empower teams to make sound decisions, and ensure consistent, high-quality delivery of platforms that directly impact client experience and business outcomes

Key Responsibilities

1) People Leadership & Performance Management

• Lead and develop a team of platform engineers, including hiring, onboarding, coaching, and career development.
• Set clear expectations and goals, track progress, provide continuous feedback, and address performance issues promptly.
• Build a culture of ownership where teams can deliver predictably and with high quality, minimizing "manager-directed intervention."

2) Platform Strategy, Vision, and Roadmap

• Define and communicate a platform vision that improves developer productivity and accelerates time-to-market for client-facing features through reusable services, paved roads, and golden paths.
• Translate strategic business needs into a prioritized platform roadmap, balancing feature velocity with reliability, resilience, and compliance expectations.
• Anticipate consequences and plan for contingencies (capacity, resiliency, vendor/platform changes, regulatory shifts).

3) Technical Leadership: Architecture & Engineering Rigor

• Provide technical direction and oversight for system design and architecture, ensuring compatibility with modern cloud architectures and scalable patterns.
• Establish repeatable, scalable engineering processes (e.g., migration playbooks, deployment patterns, testing strategies) that improve consistency and quality.
• Drive engineering excellence: architecture reviews, operational readiness reviews, incident postmortems, and continuous improvement loops.

4) Reliability, Resilience, and Operational Excellence

• Partner with client application teams to ensure platforms meet strict SLAs/SLOs for availability and performance in a highly regulated, performance-sensitive environment.
• Lead initiatives that reduce operational overhead and risk through automation, standardization, and self-service.
• Improve resiliency through capacity planning, fault tolerance, observability, and incident response maturity.

5) Secure-by-Design & Compliance Alignment (Financial Services)

• Embed security controls and compliance requirements into platform capabilities (e.g., identity, secrets, encryption, audit logging, change governance).
• Collaborate with risk, security, and governance partners to ensure platform guardrails enable speed without compromising safety and regulatory obligations.

6) Hybrid Cloud Enablement

• Lead platform capabilities that support cloud adoption and modernization (infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD, runtime platforms, service networking, standardized environments).
• Guide the team on best practices for cloud cost, scalability, and platform lifecycle management, leveraging patterns aligned with cloud architectures.

7) AI Enablement (Platform + Developer Productivity)

• Enable AI-driven engineering workflows where appropriate (e.g., developer copilots, automated quality checks, intelligent incident triage, knowledge retrieval for runbooks).
• Provide governance and engineering standards for safe AI use, including model usage patterns, prompt/data hygiene, and operational monitoring-particularly important in financial services.
• Build technology foundation for scaling client facing AI use cases.

8) Cross-Team Coordination & Stakeholder Management

• Manage technical dependencies across multiple teams and initiatives; sequence work to protect delivery timelines.
• Build collaborative relationships and influence across a matrixed organization, communicating status, risks, and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Drive requirements lifecycle from epics to well-defined stories, acceptance criteria, capacity planning, and backlog readiness.

What you have

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 10+ years of people management experience leading engineering teams (often 10+ engineers) in complex, distributed environments.
• 10+ years of hands-on engineering experience building resilient, scalable applications/services or providing solution architecture on the .Net platform in large enterprises.
• Demonstrated ability to define and communicate strategy, and influence across the enterprise.
• Background supporting client-facing digital channels (web/mobile/API ecosystems) where performance, availability, and usability are paramount.
• Strong experience with modern software delivery practices (CI/CD, trunk-based development or equivalent), operational ownership, and measurable reliability improvements.
• Proven experience in cloud technologies (public cloud and/or hybrid), platform design patterns, and infrastructure automation.
• Experience working with AI and large language model (LLM)-based solutions
• Experience enabling AI/ML platforms or AI-assisted engineering workflows at scale (guardrails, observability, governance)

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior work in financial services or similarly regulated industries (risk/compliance/change management familiarity).
• Familiarity with modern DevEx/IDP tooling, service catalog approaches, and self-service infrastructure.
• Proven background in building internal developer platforms (IDPs), paved roads, or self-service capabilities that improve engineering velocity.
• Experience operating in large, matrixed enterprises, balancing multiple stakeholders, priorities, and long-term strategic goals.
• Track record of leading large scale cloud-native platform transformations (public cloud, hybrid, or multi-cloud) in large enterprises.
• Experience building Agentic AI applications and deployed Gen AI based solutions to production

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

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