Senior Automation Controls Engineer

USAA•San Antonio, TX

6d•$103,450 - $197,730•Onsite

About The Position

USAA is seeking a Senior Automation Controls Engineer to independently assess the safety of production automation in a regulated financial institution. The role focuses on technically reviewing and stress-testing automation designs, blast-radius containment, rollback logic, and failure handling before automation is approved for greater autonomy. The engineer has authority to challenge unsafe designs and independently invoke a kill switch. The position is based in San Antonio, Texas, with an on-site requirement five days per week. Relocation assistance is not available. The engineer will own and improve the technical design of the approval-gate and kill-switch framework, conduct chaos engineering and fault-injection exercises, investigate automation-related incidents, and produce control evidence for Risk and Audit. The position participates in an automation-safety on-call rotation for live actions at autonomy level 3 or above. The salary range is $103,450–$197,730. Actual pay may vary by location and experience; employees may also be eligible for performance-based incentives. USAA does not provide visa sponsorship for this role. The position is open until filled.

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 automation code.
Practical understanding of idempotency, precondition/postcondition design, and blast-radius containment.
Demonstrated experience using chaos engineering, fault injection, or game-day testing to validate automation safety before production.
Experience with approval-gated or policy-controlled execution systems.
Experience producing control evidence for a risk or audit function.
Experience investigating production incidents involving misbehaving automation.
Ability to challenge engineering designs using technical reasoning.

Nice To Haves

Demonstrated experience identifying and remediating automation safety vulnerabilities and control gaps before production incidents occur.
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 environments.
Experience partnering with Risk, Internal Audit, or related governance functions to develop clear and defensible control-effectiveness evidence.

Responsibilities

Review proposed automation for autonomy-ladder progression by examining code and designs for gaps in blast-radius containment, rollback logic, and failure handling.
Design and conduct chaos engineering, fault-injection, or game-day exercises against proposed automation before production.
Own and improve the technical design of the approval-gate and kill-switch framework.
Investigate incidents involving incorrectly executed application automation or kill-switch activation.
Produce control evidence for 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.