Senior Manager, Mainframe Infrastructure

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 financial services industry together.

Schwab Technology Services enables the future of how clients manage their money by delivering innovative, secure, and reliable technology solutions that support our clients, employees, and business partners.

Position Overview

The Senior Manager, Mainframe Infrastructure is first and foremost a people leader. This role leads a team of Mainframe Engineers and Infrastructure Specialists who support Schwab's critical enterprise mainframe platforms. The leader is accountable for building an engaged, capable, and resilient team; setting clear priorities; removing barriers; and ensuring work is delivered safely, reliably, and in alignment with business needs.

The successful candidate does not need to be the team's deepest technical expert. They should bring enough knowledge of enterprise mainframe environments to understand the work, ask effective questions, recognize risk, and support sound decisions. Success will depend more heavily on leadership judgment, coaching, organizational effectiveness, stakeholder partnership, clear communication, and disciplined execution.

This leader will promote a culture of accountability, inclusion, collaboration, continuous learning, and continuous improvement. The role partners with engineering leaders, Architecture, Security, Application Development, Enterprise Operations, Audit, Risk, business stakeholders, and external service providers to maintain platform stability while strengthening workforce capability and readiness for the future.

Key Responsibilities

People Leadership and Talent Development

• Lead, coach, mentor, and develop a team of Mainframe Engineers and Infrastructure Specialists, with a strong focus on engagement, accountability, teamwork, and professional growth.
• Create an inclusive environment where employees feel trusted, supported, and empowered to raise concerns, share ideas, and make decisions within clear boundaries.
• Establish clear goals, roles, priorities, and performance expectations; provide timely feedback and conduct regular coaching and career-development conversations.
• Build individual development plans that strengthen leadership, operational, and technical capabilities across the team.
• Lead talent acquisition, onboarding, workforce planning, succession planning, knowledge transfer, and retention strategies.
• Identify critical skill and capacity risks, then develop practical plans using internal development, hiring, contractors, vendors, or managed services as appropriate.
• Partner with employees to support career mobility while maintaining appropriate continuity and bench strength for critical services.
• Address performance, behavior, workload, and team-health concerns promptly, fairly, and consistently in alignment with Leadership@Schwab principles.

Execution and Operational Leadership

• Translate business and technology priorities into clear team objectives, delivery plans, and measurable outcomes.
• Ensure appropriate ownership, staffing, escalation paths, and management attention for reliable and secure operation of the enterprise mainframe environment.
• Provide leadership during significant incidents, production events, recovery exercises, and critical business processing periods by coordinating people, decisions, communications, and follow-through.
• Promote disciplined incident, problem, change, capacity, and service-management practices without requiring the manager to personally perform detailed engineering work.
• Use operational metrics, risk indicators, employee feedback, and service outcomes to identify barriers and drive sustainable improvements.
• Ensure commitments, decisions, dependencies, and corrective actions are clearly documented, owned, and completed.

Platform Oversight and Decision Support

• Maintain a working knowledge of IBM zSystems and related infrastructure sufficient to understand team responsibilities, evaluate business impact, recognize material risks, and engage the appropriate subject-matter experts.
• Rely on technical leads and engineers for deep technical analysis while providing clear decision frameworks, prioritization, escalation, and accountability.
• Sponsor platform lifecycle, resiliency, automation, capacity, modernization, and operational-improvement initiatives based on business value, risk reduction, and team readiness.
• Ask effective questions, challenge assumptions constructively, and ensure significant technical decisions include appropriate review, documentation, and stakeholder alignment.
• Promote knowledge sharing and reduce dependency on individual technical experts through documentation, cross-training, and succession planning.

Risk, Security, and Compliance Leadership

• Ensure the team understands and meets Schwab security, risk, audit, regulatory, and control expectations.
• Create clear ownership and timely follow-through for audit requests, control activities, risk remediation, access governance, resiliency, and disaster recovery readiness.
• Escalate material risks and resource constraints with concise business context, impact, options, and recommendations.
• Partner with control functions and subject-matter experts to resolve issues and strengthen sustainable operational practices.

Financial and Vendor Management

• Manage budgets, workforce investments, vendor relationships, software renewals, hardware maintenance, and service-provider engagements within established governance.
• Participate in business-case development, investment planning, sourcing decisions, and contract discussions.
• Hold vendors and service providers accountable for agreed outcomes, service quality, transparency, and issue resolution.
• Balance cost, capability, employee impact, operational risk, and service requirements when recommending investment or sourcing decisions.

Stakeholder Partnership and Communication

• Build trusted partnerships across Architecture, Engineering, Operations, Cybersecurity, Application Development, Audit, Risk, Finance, Procurement, business teams, and executive leadership.
• Communicate priorities, progress, operational health, workforce risks, and investment needs in clear business language appropriate to the audience.
• Facilitate decisions across teams with competing priorities and ensure alignment on ownership, timing, risk, and expected outcomes.
• Represent the team effectively with senior leaders while creating visibility and development opportunities for employees and technical leads.

What you have

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in technology, infrastructure, operations, engineering, or a related enterprise environment.
• 5+ years of direct people-leadership experience, including coaching, performance management, talent development, hiring, and organizational planning.
• Demonstrated success leading teams responsible for critical, highly available technology services.
• Working knowledge of enterprise mainframe environments and operational practices; deep hands-on engineering expertise is not required.
• Experience leading through incidents, organizational change, competing priorities, and complex cross-functional dependencies.
• Experience with workforce planning, succession planning, knowledge-transfer risk, and employee development.
• Experience managing vendors, service providers, budgets, or technology investments.
• Strong understanding of risk management, controls, audit, security, and operational resiliency in a regulated enterprise environment.
• Excellent written, verbal, and executive communication skills, with the ability to translate technical and operational issues into business impact and decisions.
• Proven ability to influence outcomes, build trust, and create accountability across multiple organizations and levels.

Preferred Qualifications

• People-leadership experience in financial services, another regulated industry, or a large-scale enterprise technology organization.
• General familiarity with IBM zSystems, z/OS, mainframe storage, networking, capacity, resiliency, or infrastructure lifecycle concepts.
• Experience leading distributed, remote, hybrid, or multi-location teams.
• Experience with outsourced services, managed service providers, staff augmentation, or strategic sourcing models.
• Experience sponsoring modernization, automation, process improvement, or operating-model transformation initiatives.
• Leadership, ITIL, PMP, Agile, or other relevant professional training or certification.

Leadership Profile

• Leads with empathy, courage, transparency, and sound judgment.
• Develops people and creates opportunities for others to lead.
• Builds clarity and accountability without micromanaging technical work.
• Remains calm and decisive during ambiguity, incidents, and organizational change.
• Balances employee experience, client impact, operational risk, and business outcomes.
• Values technical expertise while recognizing that the manager’s primary role is to enable the team, not replace its subject-matter experts.

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