AI Platform Architect - Principal

USAA•San Antonio, TX

1d•$164,780 - $305,780•Hybrid

About The Position

USAA is seeking a Principal AI Platform Architect to lead the strategy, architecture, and evolution of its enterprise AI platform. The role defines scalable, secure, and compliant capabilities for generative AI, agentic AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics across the enterprise. Working with senior business and technology leaders, the architect establishes standards, governance frameworks, and platform roadmaps to accelerate responsible AI innovation and adoption and deliver business value. The position collaborates across business and technology domains, shapes architecture decisions and roadmaps, and provides guidance to executives and stakeholders. It leads technical design across systems, services, and dataflows; defines architecture standards and policies; supports risk and compliance practices; and mentors experienced architects, engineers, and other technology colleagues. The role also contributes to enterprise technology planning and production issue resolution, and maintains external industry relationships and technical eminence. The work environment is flexible but requires being in the office four days per week. The position may be based in San Antonio, Plano, Charlotte, or Phoenix. Relocation assistance is available. USAA does not provide visa sponsorship for this role.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree, or four years of relevant education and/or experience.
10+ years of experience in technology architecture, platform engineering, software engineering, data architecture, or related disciplines, including leadership of enterprise-scale technology transformation initiatives.
Experience defining and evolving enterprise platform strategies, reference architectures, technology standards, and multi-year roadmaps that enable emerging technology adoption 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.
Success partnering across technology, product, data, risk, security, legal, and business organizations to establish operating models, governance structures, and execution frameworks.
Deep understanding of applying AI across the technology lifecycle, including architecture, software development, testing, operations, platform engineering, and developer productivity workflows.
Ability to evaluate, influence, and guide enterprise AI technology investments by defining business outcomes, adoption strategies, value realization metrics, and success frameworks.
Experience communicating technology strategies, architecture decisions, risks, and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical audiences, including executives.
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 in highly regulated industries.
Experience leading cross-functional architecture efforts across application, data, integration, cloud, security, and AI domains.

Nice To Haves

Experience architecting enterprise AI platforms using AWS Bedrock, OpenAI, Anthropic, or equivalent foundation model ecosystems.
Experience designing enterprise agent architectures, orchestration frameworks, tool integration patterns, and autonomous workflow capabilities.
Experience designing enterprise knowledge architecture and context management, including knowledge graphs, semantic models, vector search, metadata platforms, retrieval architectures, and context engineering patterns.
Experience establishing enterprise AI governance, observability, evaluation, security, and model lifecycle management in highly regulated environments.

Responsibilities

Collaborate with business and IT stakeholders to finalize strategy, requirements, measures, risks, and controls across multiple domains, considering cross-stream impacts.
Coordinate with domain architects on technology decisions and architecture artifacts, and develop evolutionary strategies and roadmaps across business functions or IT domains.
Build trusted relationships with business executives and IT stakeholders, providing leadership and guidance to influence priorities, funding, execution, and architecture direction.
Assess domain applications with business and application owners, identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and risks, advise executive business owners on courses of action, and provide assessment summaries to the CTO for board presentations.
Define and document architecture standards, principles, and policies across domains; use risk assessment methodologies to evaluate and approve or reject waivers.
Participate in technology ecosystem activities, including Program Increment planning and troubleshooting Availability Command Center incidents involving complex production issues across multiple technology domains.
Mentor experienced architects, engineers, and technology colleagues; recommend mentoring opportunities that build team redundancy and backfill capacity.
Lead technical design and definition of systems, services, and dataflows across multiple domains or portfolios.
Execute architecture practices and processes, ensure timely completion of deliverables, and drive and sponsor enhancements.
Maintain external relationships with industry organizations, government boards, and vendors; contribute to external eminence through certifications, conference presentations, technical publications, open source, patents, or similar activities.
Ensure business risks are identified, measured, monitored, and controlled in accordance with risk and compliance policies and procedures.