Senior Automation Controls Engineer

USAA Life Insurance Company; San Antonio (TX); Híbrido; USD 103.000 - 198.000; Jornada completa

Descripción de la vacante

USAA Life Insurance Company in San Antonio, TX is seeking a Senior Automation Controls Engineer to ensure safety across production automation before deployment. The role focuses on reviewing designs, conducting chaos testing, and improving the approval-gate framework within a regulated financial institution.

On-site work is required five days a week. The candidate will lead incident investigations, provide test coverage and evidence for Risk and Audit, and participate in on-call activities for

Formación

• Bachelor's degree; OR 4 years of relevant education and/or experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on software or site-reliability engineering experience, including production automation.
• Strong programming ability in Python to read and critique automation code.
• Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or game-day testing.
• Experience with approval-gated or policy-controlled execution systems and producing evidence for audits.

Responsabilidades

• Review automation proposed for autonomy-ladder progression by reading code and design for gaps in blast-radius containment, rollback logic, and failure handling.
• Design and run chaos engineering and fault injection tests against proposed automation before production.
• Own and improve the approval-gate and kill-switch framework as new automation patterns emerge.
• Investigate incidents where automation failed and produce evidence required by Risk and Audit.
• Participate in on-call rotation for autonomy level 3 or above and invoke a kill switch when necessary.

Conocimientos

Python programming

Code review

Incident investigation

Risk & audit collaboration

Regulated environment experience

Educación

Bachelor's degree; OR 4 years of relevant education/experience

Herramientas

AWS Fault Injection Service

Chaos Mesh

Chaos Toolkit

Gremlin

Descripción del empleo

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

We are seeking a dedicated Senior Automation Controls Engineer. Every automation this organization ships has to clear the approval-gate, blast-radius, and kill-switch framework before it touches production - but today, making sure that framework actually holds is everyone's part-time responsibility rather than any one person's job. The Automation Controls Engineer is a specialist hired specifically for skepticism: your job is to find the reason an automation shouldn't ship, before a regulator, an auditor, or a bad incident finds it for you.

This isn't a compliance-checklist role - it's a deeply technical one, reviewing and stress-testing other engineers' automation design, blast-radius containment, and rollback logic against real failure modes, inside a regulated financial institution where the standing policy is that no customer-facing or money-movement automation gets full autonomy without someone exactly like you signing off.

This position will be based in San Antonio; TX and offers a flexible working environment with an on-site requirement of 5 days per week. Relocation assistance is not available for this position.

What you'll do:

• Review every automation proposed for autonomy-ladder progression, reading the actual code and design - not just the documentation - for gaps in blast-radius containment, rollback logic, and failure handling.
• Design and run chaos engineering, fault injection, or game-day exercises - using tools such as AWS Fault Injection Service, Chaos Mesh, or Gremlin - against proposed automation before it goes live, specifically trying to make it fail unsafely.
• Own the technical design of the approval-gate and kill-switch framework itself - not just enforce it, but improve it as new automation patterns emerge.
• Investigate every incident where application automation executed incorrectly or a kill switch was invoked, and produce the control evidence - test coverage, known-failure-mode documentation, exercised kill-switch logs - that Risk and Audit require.
• Participate in the automation-safety on-call rotation for any live action at autonomy level 3 or above, with authority to invoke a kill switch independently.

What You Have:

• Bachelor's degree; OR 4 years of relevant education and/or experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on software or site-reliability engineering experience, including direct experience building or operating production automation, and comfort operating in a regulated environment with direct exposure to risk, audit, or model governance review processes.
• Strong programming ability in Python or a comparable language, sufficient to read and critique another engineer's automation code, with practical understanding of idempotency, precondition/postcondition design, and blast-radius containment.
• Demonstrated experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or game-day testing - AWS Fault Injection Service, Chaos Mesh, Chaos Toolkit, Gremlin, or equivalent - used to validate automation safety before production.
• Experience with approval-gated or policy-controlled execution systems, and experience producing control evidence for a risk or audit function.
• Experience investigating production incidents to root cause, specifically ones involving automation that misbehaved, with the comfort to push back on other engineers' designs using technical reasoning rather than authority.

What Sets You Apart:

• Demonstrated experience identifying and remediating automation safety vulnerabilities and control gaps before they result in production incidents.
• Experience designing and leading chaos engineering, game-day, or resilience exercises that strengthen automation design, operational readiness, and engineering practices.
• Proven experience managing production automation risk during critical incidents, including the use of kill switches, rollback mechanisms, or other safety controls when necessary.
• Experience designing, implementing, or materially enhancing approval-gate, policy-enforcement, and automation control frameworks within production environments.
• Demonstrated experience partnering with Risk, Internal Audit, or related governance functions to develop clear, complete, and defensible evidence supporting control effectiveness and regulatory or organizational requirements.

Compensation range: The salary range for this position is: $103,450- $197,730 .