Senior Automation Safety & Chaos Engineer

USAA Life Insurance Company; San Antonio (TX); Hybrid; USD 103,000 - 198,000; Full time

Job summary

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

Qualifications

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Skills

Python programming

Code review

Incident investigation

Risk & audit collaboration

Regulated environment experience

Education

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

Tools

AWS Fault Injection Service

Chaos Mesh

Chaos Toolkit

Gremlin

Job description

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