At Charles 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).
We are hiring a Lead Engineer focusing on security and custody architecture to serve as the technical authority for Crypto Custody engineering, with deep ownership of key management, custody security architecture, and risk posture across Schwab’s digital asset platforms.
This is a hands on, high impact individual contributor role.. The Lead Engineer sets technical direction, defines custody architecture, and owns critical design decisions across HSMs, MPC, key storage, policy enforcement, disaster recovery, and incident response.
This role requires strong engineering judgment in high risk, high trust environments, and the ability to operate with autonomy while influencing teams, architects, security, and leadership.
What This Engineer Will Do
Custody Key Management & Cryptographic Architecture
• Design, implement, and evolve institutional grade key management architectures, including:
• Hardware Security Modules (HSMs)
• Multi Party Computation (MPC)
• Secure key generation, storage, rotation, signing, and recovery
• Define clear trade offs and architectural patterns across hot wallet, warm wallet, and cold storage models.
• Ensure cryptographic designs align with regulatory, security, and audit expectations.
• Partner closely with Cybersecurity and Risk to embed defense in depth and zero trust principles into custody design.
Custody Policy Engine & Governance
• Lead the design of the Custody Policy Engine, governing:
• Authorization, approvals, limits, and segregation of duties
• Transaction controls and exception handling
• 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.
Disaster Recovery, Resilience & Incident Ownership
• 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.
Overall Custody Architecture & Risk Posture
• Act as the custody architecture authority, ensuring consistency across wallets, blockchains, environments, and platforms.
• Identify architectural and operational risks early; 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.
AI Augmented Engineering Excellence
• Leverage GenAI and agentic AI tools to accelerate architecture design, threat modeling, documentation, testing, and reviews.
• Set expectations for AI assisted engineering rigor—speed with correctness, not shortcuts.
• Partner with engineering teams to raise architecture, code, and documentation quality across custody components.
What you have
Required Qualifications
• 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.
Strongly Preferred
• 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.
What Success Looks Like
• Custody key management and policy systems are secure, resilient, auditable, and trusted.
• Failure modes are well understood, modeled, and operationally prepared for.
• Incidents are handled with clarity, speed, and technical confidence.
• Custody architecture scales across assets, chains, and tokenized products without erosion of risk posture.
• This role is viewed as the technical backbone of Schwab’s digital asset custody strategy.
"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