Lead AI Ops Engineer - Infrastructure

The Opportunity

The Infrastructure AI Ops team's Senior engineers build and operate the data-to-automation pipeline for individual capacity, anomaly, and remediation use cases.

As the Lead AI Ops Engineer - Infrastructure, you own what's harder than any single use case: the technical judgment calls that don't have an obvious owner - which anomaly-detection or capacity-modeling approach should become the pattern every new infrastructure use case reuses, whether a topology-reconciliation design scales past the next order of magnitude of the estate, what a remediation needs before it's trusted to run at autonomy level 4 against production compute or storage.

You'll still write code and ship - this is not a step off the keyboard - but you will 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 - telemetry-consuming feature pipelines, topology-graph design, infrastructure-as-code remediation 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 infrastructure 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 and infrastructure-as-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 infrastructure, platform, or site-reliability 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 infrastructure operational data using frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or scikit-learn, plus advanced, hands-on expertise with infrastructure-as-code and orchestration tooling - Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes operators - including setting team conventions.
• Demonstrated experience designing and defending production automation that has executed against a regulated institution's production infrastructure, 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 Infrastructure AI Ops solutions that are adopted across engineering teams.
• Proven experience serving as a senior technical escalation point during critical production incidents, providing technical leadership and decision-making for complex infrastructure automation solutions.
• Experience designing and implementing operational AI evaluation, safety, and control frameworks that are scalable and adopted across multiple teams or functions.
• Experience designing or operating highly autonomous, self-healing infrastructure capabilities, including automated production remediation and the technical controls, validation, governance, and evidence required to support implementation.
• Demonstrated experience representing engineering in engagements with Model Risk Management, Internal Audit, or similar governance functions, effectively communicating 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 do not apply for this role if at any time (now or in the future) you will need immigration support (i.e., H-1B, TN, STEM OPT Training Plans, etc.).

Compensation

USAA has an effective process for assessing market data and establishing ranges to ensure we remain competitive. You are paid within the salary range based on your experience and market data of the position. The actual salary for this role may vary by location.

Employees may be eligible for pay incentives based on overall corporate and individual performance and at the discretion of the USAA Board of Directors.

The above description reflects the details considered necessary to describe the principal functions of the job and should not be construed as a detailed description of all the work requirements that may be performed in the job.

Benefits

At USAA our employees enjoy best-in-class benefits to support their physical, financial, and emotional wellness. These benefits include comprehensive medical, dental and vision plans, 401(k), pension, life insurance, parental benefits, adoption assistance, paid time off program with paid holidays plus 16 paid volunteer hours, and various wellness programs. Additionally, our career path planning and continuing education assists employees with their professional goals.

• For more details on our outstanding benefits, visit our benefits page on USAAjobs.com.
• Applications for this position are accepted on an ongoing basis, this posting will remain open until the position is filled. Thus, interested candidates are encouraged to apply the same day they view this posting.