Lead AI Ops Engineer - Application

USAA Life Insurance Company; San Antonio (TX); Hybrid; USD 127,000 - 243,000; Full time

Job summary

USAA is seeking a Lead AI Ops Engineer - Application in San Antonio, TX, with a focus on data-to-automation pipelines. You’ll own complex AIOps designs, set standards, and guide teams toward autonomous, safe remediation while staying hands-on with production code.

The role requires 7+ years in software/data engineering, ML productionization, and governance within regulated environments. Onsite 5 days/week; relocation not available. USAA values integrity and service.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or 4 years of relevant education/experience.
• 7+ years of hands-on software or data engineering experience, including ownership of production systems at scale.
• Track record as de facto technical authority on a team, leading design reviews and setting engineering standards.
• Deep experience productionizing ML models for operational use cases, including LLM-based techniques and their failure modes.
• Experience designing and defending production automation within a regulated institution, including approval gates and rollback design.
• Judgment under real incident pressure, including halting automation mid-incident.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical design and architecture for high-ambiguity AIOps builds and ship the hardest components.
• Set technical standards and reusable patterns that engineers build against.
• Lead progression up the autonomy ladder and own the evidence package for production decisions.
• Serve as primary escalation point during major incidents and lead postmortems.
• Mentor engineers on technical depth and judgment while remaining hands-on shipping production code.

Skills

AIOps leadership

Production systems ownership

Incident management

LLM safety evaluation

Automation design

TensorFlow

PyTorch

scikit-learn

Education

Bachelor’s degree or 4 years of relevant education/experience

Tools

TensorFlow

PyTorch

scikit-learn

Job description

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 escalation point for production incidents, providing technical direction and decision-making for complex automation and operational AI solutions.
• Experience designing and implementing evaluation, safety, and control frameworks for operational AI that are scalable and adopted across multiple teams or functions.
• Experience designing or operating highly autonomous or self-healing remediation capabilities, including technical controls, governance, validation, and evidence required to support production approval.
• Demonstrated experience representing engineering in engagements with Model Risk Management, Internal Audit, or similar governance functions, effectively articulating and resolving complex technical, risk, and control considerations.
• US military experience gained through military service or gained as a military spouse / domestic partner.

Compensation range:

The salary range for this position is: $127,310 - $243,340.

USAA does not provide visa sponsorship for this role. Please d