Lead AI Ops Engineer - Remote | Autonomous ML & Incidents

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

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.