Senior AI Ops Engineer - Application

The Opportunity

The Application AI Ops team is where machine learning meets the business logic customers touch — the services, APIs, and transaction flows that move money and keep accounts current.

As a Senior AI Ops Engineer on this team, you won’t be prototyping in a notebook and handing it off for someone else to ship: you’ll build the ingestion pipelines that turn application logs, traces, and business-transaction signals into features; train and tune the models that catch a degrading payment API or an anomalous checkout failure before a customer calls in; and then write the deterministic, tested automation that acts on what those models find — a guided remediation, a safe auto-restart, a rollback that actually rolls back.

This is a from-scratch build inside a regulated financial institution, which means your code will eventually touch production systems that move real money, under real audit scrutiny — and the engineering bar reflects that.

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

• Build and operate high-throughput ingestion and feature pipelines that consume application logs, traces, APM data, and business-transaction events — collected by the Observability & Telemetry team — into the AIOps feature store.
• Train, validate, and tune anomaly-detection and forecasting models against application and transaction-level signals, and build LLM-based log parsing, summarization, and root-cause-hypothesis components with explicit handling for hallucination risk.
• Design and build event correlation and probable-cause ranking logic that reduces raw application alert volume reaching a human.
• Write, test, and version remediation automation for application-layer failure modes, with tested rollback for every action, operating within the approval-gate, blast-radius, and kill-switch framework.
• Instrument and monitor your own models and automations in production, retraining on a defined cadence, and participate in the on-call rotation for any live action at autonomy level 3 or above.
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What you have

• Bachelor's degree; OR 4 years of relevant education and/or experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on software or data engineering experience, with strong programming ability in Python plus a second production language — code that ships, is tested, and is code-reviewed, not just notebooks.
• Practical experience building and productionizing ML models — anomaly detection, classification, or forecasting — using frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or scikit-learn, including the full lifecycle from training through retraining.
• Working fluency with LLM-based techniques — prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs — and a clear-eyed understanding of their failure modes.
• Experience writing and testing operational automation — workflow orchestration, runbook-as-code — including rollback design and approval-gated or policy-controlled execution.
• Comfort operating in a regulated environment, with demonstrated ability to debug and reason about a live production incident under time pressure.

What sets you apart

• Proven experience deploying model-driven root-cause analysis or incident triage solutions used in production application operations.
• Experience building production automation with tested guardrails, safety controls, and kill-switch capabilities.
• Experience developing AI evaluation and monitoring frameworks, including regression testing, model and prompt evaluation, and drift detection.
• Experience with event correlation, alert grouping, and high-volume application telemetry, including exposure to enterprise AIOps platforms such as Moogsoft, BigPanda, or Dynatrace.
• Experience working with model governance or model risk teams and supporting model validation through appropriate documentation, including model cards.
• US military experience gained through military service or gained as a military spouse / domestic partner

Compensation range

The salary range for this position is: $114,080 - $218,030.

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.