Roland Schneider grew up in Heidelberg and left Germany for New York in 1991, where he studied drums at the New School and took a bachelor's degree. He stayed seventeen years. By his own account the decision to play drums at all was made in a single afternoon: at a dull carnival event run by the local gymnastics club the children were allowed onto the band's instruments, he sat down behind the kit, and he was a different person afterwards.

His first documented recordings come from a Swedish-German group working out of New York. The Rigmor Gustafsson Quintet, with the singer at the front and Tino Derado on piano, Gabriel Coburger on saxophone and Hans Glawischnig on bass, cut In The Light Of Day at Acoustic Recording in Brooklyn on 26 and 27 April 1996, and Plan #46 at Systems Two in New York on 1, 2 and 3 September 1998. Both went out on the Swedish label Prophone. The partnership with Derado outlasted the band by a quarter of a century: the pianist and accordionist used Schneider on his own Luminescence (Sunnyside, 2003) alongside the bassist Matt Penman and the guitarist Guilherme Monteiro, and the two were still working together on Jacqueline Boulanger's Reach Out in 2023.

The band that defines his catalogue formed in 1999. The pianist Anat Fort had self-released her quintet debut Peel, on which the drum chair belonged to another German, Heinrich Köbberling; the reception it got gave her the push to put a working trio together, and she found Schneider and the bassist Gary Wang in a rehearsal basement in the East Village. The group was playing new Fort compositions at Roulette in New York on 5 April 2003, that night with the clarinettist Perry Robinson added, seven years before it made a record. When the record came, it came on ECM: And If (ECM 2109) was taped at Rainbow Studio in Oslo in February 2009 under Manfred Eicher and issued in 2010, and Slate's Fred Kaplan named it one of the ten best jazz albums of that year. Birdwatching (ECM 2382) followed, recorded in November 2013 with the Italian reed player Gianluigi Trovesi added and released in 2016; then Colour (Sunnyside SSC 1550), cut at LowSwing in Berlin in May 2018; then the double album The Berlin Sessions (Sunnyside SSC 1687), recorded at EBS and Hansa Studios in Berlin in April 2022. Schneider writes inside the group as well as playing in it. He shares the composer credit with Fort, Wang and Trovesi on the closing piece of Birdwatching, holds it with Fort and Wang on all four pieces of the first disc of The Berlin Sessions, and contributed additional English texts to the Colour booklet. Nine years into the trio's life the three of them scattered: Schneider went to Berlin, Fort returned to Tel Aviv and Wang stayed in New York, which has not stopped the band touring the United States, Canada, Europe, China and Israel, or playing the Montreal Jazz Festival, the JVC Jazz Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Blue Note, Birdland, the Tel Aviv Opera House, the Duc des Lombards in Paris, Porgy and Bess in Vienna and the A-Trane in Berlin. He is not on Fort's 2025 quartet album The Dreamworld of Paul Motian, which she made with Steve Cardenas, Wang and Matt Wilson.

Berlin gave him a second working life. Since 2015 he has held the drum chair in the Danish bassist Anne Mette Iversen's Ternion Quartet, a Berlin band completed by the alto saxophonist Silke Eberhard and the trombonist Geoffroy De Masure, which recorded its first album over two days at Blackbird Studio in Berlin in October 2016 and released it on Brooklyn Jazz Underground Records in 2017. Invincible Nimbus (2019) followed, and in 2025 the group expanded to seven pieces as Ternion Q Expanded for Marbles, with Percy Pursglove, Morris Kliphuis and Julius Gawlik added to the front line. He is also the drummer in the singer Esther Kaiser's long-standing Berlin band with Derado, the bassist Marc Muellbauer and the guitarist Rüdiger Krause, a group that has made three albums for GLM Music: Learning How To Listen, a programme of Abbey Lincoln's music recorded for Berlin's RBB between September 2012 and June 2013; Songs of Courage (2018), which set Hanns Eisler and Pete Seeger beside Chick Corea and brought in the Damascus kanun player Al Hasan Al Nour; and Water (2022). A third Berlin association is entirely free: with the pianist Andreas Schmidt he has played as a duo and in Schmidt's rotating groups at the A-Trane since at least 2013, and the two released "blues" in August 2017, fourteen improvisations on blues themes recorded in a Charlottenburg flat with nothing but piano and drums.

Around that sit two decades of German sideman work. He made five albums with the Bulgarian pianist Bojan Assenov's trio and quartet on Konnex Records between 2011 and 2013, with Ed Schuller on bass throughout and the Romanian reed player Nicolas Simion added from Tamzara onward. He drummed for the NDR Bigband on Coburger (2010), Wolf Kerschek's arrangements of Gabriel Coburger's writing, and for the Maria Baptist Orchestra on Here & Now, recorded live at the Kunstfabrik Schlot in Berlin on 2 and 3 March 2016, where he takes a solo on three of the eight pieces. Other leaders who have used him include the guitarist Sandra Hempel, the vibraphonist Stefan Bauer, the saxophonist Max Hacker, the singer Birgit Wunsch and the pianist Stefan Graser.

He teaches as well. He joined the Leo-Borchard-Musikschule, the state music school of Berlin's Steglitz-Zehlendorf district, and has been on its permanent staff since 2016, where he heads the department that runs its partnerships with schools and other institutions.

Schneider is a restraint player in a music that rewards restraint. Reviewing the trio at the Hospitalkirche in Schwäbisch Hall in March 2010, Hans Kumpf described him as working mostly with brushes, gently and unobtrusively, and noted that even when he picks up sticks he does not turn into a basher. The compliment is precise, because the Fort trio's writing runs at moderate tempos almost without exception and asks the drums to shade a line rather than drive it. The same concert had him bowing his cymbals while Wang bowed the bass strings and Fort played inside the piano, which is the other half of what he does. Between the ECM records and the free piano-and-drums duo with Andreas Schmidt there is a wide gap in volume and almost none in method: he is a colourist in both. What he is not is a soloist looking for features, and the pattern of his career reflects it, since the bands that take him on tend to keep him for a decade or more. He also writes, though every composer credit he holds is a collective one, earned inside groups that build pieces without a written theme. The clearest example is the first disc of The Berlin Sessions, four pieces credited jointly to Fort, Wang and himself.