QA Engineer - Real-Time Trading Platform

The Charles Schwab Corporation; Ann Arbor (MI); On-site; USD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) with company match

Paid vacation and sabbatical program

Parental leave and family benefits

Tuition reimbursement

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Job summary

The Charles Schwab Corporation is seeking a Quality Assurance Engineer to help ensure the reliability, performance, and accuracy of the thinkorswim trading platform. You will design and drive test automation for backend services, APIs, and distributed systems in a fast-paced agile environment.

You will collaborate with engineers, product owners, and platform teams, mentoring peers while expanding test coverage and driving automation-first practices.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience testing the thinkorswim code base, including charting applications, market data services, trading workflows, or supporting backend systems.
• Proven ability to design and execute comprehensive test strategies for backend services, APIs, and distributed systems, including service-to-service communication, messaging platforms, and event-driven architectures.
• Strong analytical skills with experience validating real-time market data, charting services, technical studies, historical data processing, order routing, and other critical backend systems using production-like data and environments.
• Expertise testing complex trading and charting platforms, including real-time market data pipelines, chart rendering services, technical study calculations, historical data processing, scanner services, watchlist synchronization, and order execution workflows, ensuring accuracy, resiliency, and performance at scale.
• Experience developing and maintaining automated testing frameworks, and current working experience with Schwab systems and processes.
• Strong troubleshooting skills in high-throughput, low-latency systems using logs, metrics, tracing, and observability tools.
• Strong technical expertise in Java, microservices, REST APIs, messaging technologies (Kafka, RabbitMQ, JMS, QDS, or similar), and CI/CD tooling including Git, Maven/Gradle, and TeamCity or GitHub Actions.
• Experience leveraging SQL and relational databases for large-scale data validation, root-cause analysis, and system verification.
• Experience collaborating closely with software engineers, product owners, and platform teams throughout the software development lifecycle.
• Strong understanding of Agile development methodologies and quality engineering best practices.
• Demonstrated ability to lead quality engineering initiatives, promote automation-first practices, and drive continuous improvements in test effectiveness and release reliability.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and execute test strategies for backend services, APIs, distributed systems, and event-driven architectures supporting the thinkorswim platform.
• Build and maintain automated test frameworks and validation pipelines that improve test coverage, release confidence, and overall software quality.
• Validate real-time market data, charting services, technical studies, historical data processing, scanners, watchlists, and order execution workflows to ensure accuracy, reliability, and performance.
• Partner with software engineers, product owners, and stakeholders to ensure quality is built into every stage of the software development lifecycle.
• Analyze and troubleshoot defects across complex distributed systems using logs, metrics, traces, and observability tooling.
• Support production releases, issue triage, root-cause analysis, and remediation efforts to improve platform stability and resiliency.
• Lead quality engineering initiatives by driving automation-first practices, expanding test coverage, and improving testing processes and tooling.
• Mentor team members and provide technical leadership on quality engineering best practices.

Skills

Java

REST APIs

Microservices

CI/CD tooling

SQL

Test automation

Distributed systems

Troubleshooting

Agile

Observability

Tools

Git

Maven/Gradle

TeamCity

GitHub Actions

Kafka

RabbitMQ

JMS

QDS

Job description

The Charles Schwab Corporation is seeking a Quality Assurance Engineer to help ensure the reliability, performance, and accuracy of the thinkorswim trading platform. You will design and drive test automation for backend services, APIs, and distributed systems in a fast-paced agile environment.

You will collaborate with engineers, product owners, and platform teams, mentoring peers while expanding test coverage and driving automation-first practices.