Senior Automation Controls Engineer

• Location: San Antonio Home Office I
• 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.

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.