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Agent guide: [/agents.md](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/agents.md). --- # Lead AI Ops Engineer - Infrastructure - **Company:** United Services Automobile Association - **Location:** San Antonio, TX, United States - **Experience:** Expert - **Salary:** $127,310.0 - $243,340.0 - **Contract:** Permanent contract - **Skills:** AI Evaluation, Machine Learning, Operational Data Store, Reliability Engineering, Ansible, Tensorflow, Software Technical Review, Pytorch, Scikit Learn, Kubernetes, Production Code, Terraform, AIOps - **Published:** October 30, 2026 - **Apply:** https://usaa.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/USAAJOBSWD/job/San-Antonio-Home-Office-I/Lead-AI-Ops-Engineer---Infrastructure_R0121944/apply ## About the Role * 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., * 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. ## Description 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'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., * 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.