Why USAA?
At USAA, our mission is to empower our members to achieve financial security through highly competitive products, exceptional service and trusted advice. We seek to be the #1 choice for the military community and their families.
Embrace a fulfilling career at USAA, where our core values – honesty, integrity, loyalty and service – define how we treat each other and our members. Be part of what truly makes us special and impactful.
We are proud to support active-duty military spouses. USAA roles may offer remote or hybrid flexibility for active-duty military spouses consistent with applicable policy and business needs.
The Opportunity
The Application AI Ops team’s Senior engineers build and operate the data-to-automation pipeline for individual use cases.
As the Lead AI Ops Engineer — Application , you own what’s harder than any single use case: the technical judgment calls that don’t have an obvious owner — which anomaly-detection approach should become the pattern every new use case reuses, whether a correlation design scales past the next order of magnitude of alert volume, what a remediation needs before it’s trusted to run at autonomy level 4 against a payment-critical service. You’ll still write code and ship — this is not a step off the keyboard — but you’ll also be the person Seniors come to when a design doesn’t have a textbook answer, and the person the Director turns to when a technical bet needs a second, harder look before it’s defended to Risk and Audit.
This position offers a flexible work environment with an onsite requirement of 5 days per week. This position is based in San Antonio, TX. Relocation assistance is not available for this position.
What you'll do:
Own the technical design and architecture for the domain’s highest-ambiguity or highest-consequence AIOps builds, personally shipping the hardest components yourself rather than delegating them away.
Set the technical standards and reusable patterns — feature-engineering conventions, model evaluation harnesses, remediation-automation scaffolding — that the domain’s Senior and Associate engineers build against.
Lead the domain’s progression up the autonomy ladder — decide, with the Director, which use cases are ready to advance toward guard railed or self-healing automation, and own the evidence package that justifies it.
Serve as the primary technical escalation point during major incidents — including the real-time call on the kill switch — and lead postmortems that turn the lesson into an updated standard.
Mentor the domain’s Senior engineers on technical depth and judgment, growing the next Lead, and stay hands-on shipping production code on a regular cadence.
What you have:
Bachelor's degree; OR 4 years of relevant education and/or experience.
7+ years of hands-on software or data engineering experience, including sustained ownership of production systems at meaningful scale.
A track record of being the de facto technical authority on a team — the engineer others’ designs get checked against — including leading technical design reviews and setting engineering standards for senior-level engineers.
Deep expertise productionizing ML models for operational use cases using frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or scikit-learn, plus advanced fluency with LLM-based techniques and their failure modes, including setting guardrails and evaluation criteria.
Demonstrated experience designing and defending production automation that has executed against a regulated institution’s production systems, including the approval-gate and rollback design that made it defensible.
Demonstrated judgment under real incident pressure, including the experience and credibility to make the call to halt an automation mid-incident.
What sets you apart:
Demonstrated experience establishing technical standards, architecture patterns, and engineering practices for AIOps solutions that are adopted across engineering teams.
Proven experience serving as a senior technical…