AI Platform Architect - Principal

USAA•San Antonio, TX

6d•$164,780 - $305,780•Hybrid

About The Position

USAA is seeking a Principal AI Platform Architect to lead the strategy, architecture, and evolution of our enterprise AI platform. This role will define scalable, secure, and compliant AI capabilities that enable generative AI, agentic AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics across the enterprise. Partnering with senior business and technology leaders, you will establish architecture standards, governance frameworks, and platform roadmaps that accelerate innovation, drive adoption, and deliver business value through responsible AI at scale. We offer a flexible work environment that requires an individual to be in the office 4 days per week. This position can be based in one of the following locations: San Antonio, TX, Plano, TX, or Phoenix, AZ. Relocation assistance is available for this position.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in technology architecture, platform engineering, software engineering, data architecture, or related disciplines, including leadership of enterprise-scale technology transformation initiatives.
Demonstrated experience defining and evolving enterprise platform strategies, reference architectures, technology standards, and multi-year roadmaps that enable adoption of emerging technologies across a large organization.
Experience architecting and implementing AI, machine learning, generative AI, or advanced analytics platforms, including governance, security, scalability, operationalization, and risk management considerations.
Demonstrated success partnering across technology, product, data, risk, security, legal, and business organizations to establish operating models, governance structures, and execution frameworks that accelerate adoption and value realization.
Deep understanding of how AI capabilities can be applied across the technology lifecycle, including architecture, software development, testing, operations, platform engineering, and developer productivity workflows.
Demonstrated ability to evaluate, influence, and guide enterprise investments in AI technologies by defining measurable business outcomes, adoption strategies, value realization metrics, and success frameworks.
Experience communicating complex technology strategies, architecture decisions, risks, and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences, including executive leadership.
Demonstrated ability to influence organizational AI fluency through thought leadership, education, mentoring, architecture guidance, and cross-functional collaboration.
Deep understanding of technology governance, architecture principles, security controls, regulatory considerations, and risk management practices within highly regulated industries.
Experience leading cross-functional architecture efforts across application, data, integration, cloud, security, and AI domains to deliver cohesive enterprise technology capabilities.

Nice To Haves

Experience architecting enterprise AI platforms leveraging technologies such as AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, or equivalent foundation model ecosystems.
Experience designing and implementing enterprise agent architectures, orchestration frameworks, tool integration patterns, and autonomous workflow capabilities.
Experience designing enterprise knowledge architecture and context management capabilities, including knowledge graphs, semantic models, vector search, metadata platforms, retrieval architectures, and context engineering patterns that enable scalable and trusted AI and agentic systems.
Experience establishing enterprise AI governance, observability, evaluation, security, and model lifecycle management capabilities within highly regulated environments.

Responsibilities

Collaborates with business and IT stakeholders to understand and finalize strategy, requirements, measures, risks and controls across multiple domains considering cross stream impacts.
Utilizes expertise and research to coordinate with domain architects in the creation of technology decisions with relevant architecture artifacts and proactively apply architecture thinking to conceive evolutionary strategies and roadmaps that can accelerate current capabilities across multiple business functions or IT domains.
Cultivates productive and trusted relationships with front line business executives and IT stakeholders, to provide leadership and guidance to influence and shape priority, funding and execution of architecture solutions and direction for multiple domains and/or portfolios.
Executes and assists in review of formal assessment of domain applications in collaboration with business and application owners to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and risks. Advises executive level business owners of proposed courses of action. Provides assessment summary content to the CTO for presentation to the board.
Defines and documents architecture standards, principles, and policies for and across multiple domains to ensure architectural compliance of technology solutions. Use risk assessment methodologies to draft/evaluate and approve/reject waivers to architecture standards.
Participates in activities that support the USAA technology ecosystem such as Program Increment planning and assistance in troubleshooting of Availability Command Center incidents to resolve complex production issues related to multiple technology domains.
Provides professional and technical mentorship for experienced architects, engineers and IT community colleagues in an open, respectful, flexible and empathetic manner.
Recommends mentoring opportunities specifically to create team redundancy and back fill ability.
Leads the technical design and definition of systems, services, and dataflows across multiple domains and/or portfolios.
Executes architecture practices and processes by ensuring timely completion of deliverables, driving and sponsoring enhancements.
Maintains external relationships with contacts on industry organizations and government boards and vendors in the marketplace related to a business function or technology domain. Achieves one or more of the following external eminence activities: obtaining professional and industry technical certifications, presenting at conferences, publishing technical papers, contributing to open source, authoring patents, etc.
Ensures risks associated with business activities are effectively identified, measured, monitored, and controlled in accordance with risk and compliance policies and procedures.