Senior AI Ops Engineer - Infrastructure

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

The Infrastructure AI Ops team owns AI-enabled operations for everything the application estate runs on - compute, network, storage, and the cloud and on-prem platforms underneath it.

As a Senior AI Ops Engineer - Infrastructure on this team, you’ll build the pipelines that ingest infrastructure telemetry at real scale; train the models that baseline normal capacity and resource behavior and catch the anomaly before it becomes an outage - a disk filling, a node drifting out of healthy state, a network path degrading; and then write the automation that acts on it - a safe auto-scale, a graceful node drain and replace, a volume expansion with a tested rollback. This is a from-scratch build inside a regulated financial institution, so the reliability and audit bar is real: every automated action you ship needs a kill switch, a rollback path, and a reason a risk examiner would accept.

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 infrastructure telemetry - compute, network, storage, container, and cloud platform signals collected by the Observability & Telemetry team - into the AIOps feature store.
• Train, validate, and tune unsupervised and time-series models - isolation forests, autoencoders, LSTMs, or comparable techniques - to baseline normal infrastructure behavior and detect capacity and resource anomalies before they become incidents.
• Build the dynamic service and infrastructure topology graph from CMDB, discovery, and live signal, and design the event correlation logic that reduces raw infrastructure alert volume reaching a human.
• Write, test, and version remediation automation - Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent - for infrastructure failure modes, with a tested rollback or compensating action for every change, 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.

What you have:

• Bachelor's degree; OR 4 years of relevant education and/or experience.
• 5+ years of hands-on infrastructure, platform, or site-reliability engineering experience, with strong programming and scripting ability - Python plus Go or a comparable systems language.
• Practical experience building and productionizing ML models for operational data - anomaly detection, forecasting, or capacity modeling - using frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or scikit-learn.
• Deep, hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code and orchestration tooling - Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes operators, or equivalent - for production compute, network, and storage environments.
• Experience writing and testing operational automation with rollback, compensating actions, and approval-gated or policy-controlled execution for infrastructure changes specifically, not just application deploys.
• Comfort operating in a regulated environment, with demonstrated ability to debug and reason about a live production infrastructure incident under time pressure.

What sets you apart:

• Demonstrated experience designing, deploying, and operationalizing model-driven capacity management or anomaly-detection capabilities that support infrastructure operations and on-call engineering teams.
• Experience developing guard railed automation for production infrastructure, including automated scaling, node replacement, or storage volume expansion, with tested kill-switch and safety-control mechanisms.
• Experience designing and implementing evaluation frameworks for operational AI, including test cases, regression suites, and drift detection to identify model or threshold degradation prior to production deployment.
• Experience building or maintaining runtime service or infrastructure topology graphs and reconciling topology data with systems of record, such as a
• Configuration Management Database (CMDB), with familiarity consuming outputs from enterprise AIOps and observability platforms such as Moogsoft, BigPanda, or Dynatrace.
• Experience partnering directly with model governance or model risk functions, including developing model cards and supporting documentation to enable model validation, risk assessment, and governance review.

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.

USAA is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.