Senior Automation Controls Engineer

USAA•San Antonio, TX

1d•$103,450 - $197,730•Onsite

About The Position

USAA is seeking a Senior Automation Controls Engineer to independently scrutinize automation safety before systems are released, particularly in a regulated financial institution. The role reviews automation design and code for failure handling, blast-radius containment, rollback logic, and compliance with approval-gate and kill-switch controls. It owns and improves the technical design of that control framework and uses fault injection and chaos engineering to expose unsafe failure modes before production deployment. The engineer also investigates incidents involving misbehaving automation or kill-switch activation, documents control evidence for Risk and Audit, and participates in an automation-safety on-call rotation for live actions at autonomy level 3 or above. The role has independent authority to invoke a kill switch. It is based in San Antonio, Texas, with an on-site requirement five days per week. Relocation assistance is not available.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree, or four years of relevant education and/or experience.
At least five years of hands-on software or site-reliability engineering experience, including direct experience building or operating production automation.
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.
Practical understanding of idempotency, precondition/postcondition design, and blast-radius containment.
Demonstrated experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or game-day testing used to validate automation safety before production.
Experience with approval-gated or policy-controlled execution systems and producing control evidence for a risk or audit function.
Experience investigating production incidents to root cause, particularly incidents involving misbehaving automation.
Ability to challenge other engineers' designs using technical reasoning.

Nice To Haves

Demonstrated experience identifying and remediating automation safety vulnerabilities and control gaps before they cause production incidents.
Experience designing and leading chaos engineering, game-day, or resilience exercises that improve automation design, operational readiness, and engineering practices.
Experience managing production automation risk during critical incidents, including using kill switches, rollback mechanisms, or other safety controls.
Experience designing, implementing, or materially enhancing approval-gate, policy-enforcement, and automation control frameworks in production.
Experience partnering with Risk, Internal Audit, or related governance functions to develop clear, complete, and defensible evidence of control effectiveness and regulatory or organizational compliance.

Responsibilities

Review every automation proposed for autonomy-ladder progression, examining code and design for gaps in blast-radius containment, rollback logic, and failure handling.
Design and run chaos engineering, fault-injection, or game-day exercises against proposed automation to test whether it can fail unsafely.
Own and improve the technical design of the approval-gate and kill-switch framework as automation patterns evolve.
Investigate incidents involving incorrectly executed application automation or kill-switch invocation.
Produce control evidence required by Risk and Audit, including test coverage, known-failure-mode documentation, and exercised kill-switch logs.
Participate in the automation-safety on-call rotation for live actions at autonomy level 3 or above, with independent authority to invoke a kill switch.