below marketmost similar roles pay hereabove market
This role pays less than
56%
of similar roles. Most pay
$133,750–$186,525
— the blue band above.
At the midpoint, this role pays about
$151k
versus about
$160k
for comparable roles.
Based on 240 similar postings.
Employer
About USAA
USAA (United Services Automobile Association) is a San Antonio-based Fortune 500 financial services company founded in 1922, dedicated to providing insurance, banking, and investment solutions exclusively to U.S. military members, veterans, and their families.
USAA currently has
73 open roles
on FindRole.
Listed pay typically runs
$114,080–$218,030
across 44 roles with salary data.
The Senior Automation Controls Engineer joins the team to serve as a technical specialist responsible for identifying risks in production automation within a regulated financial institution. The role involves reviewing and stress-testing other engineers' automation designs, specifically focusing on blast-radius containment, rollback logic, and failure handling. Key responsibilities include designing and running chaos engineering and fault injection exercises, owning the technical design of approval-gate and kill-switch frameworks, and investigating production incidents to produce control evidence for risk and audit functions. Candidates must possess strong programming skills in Python or comparable languages and experience with tools such as AWS Fault Injection Service, Chaos Mesh, or Gremlin. The position requires a deep understanding of idempotency, precondition/postcondition design, and managing automation safety for money-movement systems.
Review proposed automation code and designs to identify gaps in blast-radius containment and rollback logic.
Design and execute chaos engineering and fault injection exercises to test automation failure modes before production.
Own the technical design and continuous improvement of the approval-gate and kill-switch frameworks.
Investigate production incidents involving incorrect automation execution and produce required control evidence for Risk and Audit.
Participate in the automation-safety on-call rotation and independently invoke kill switches for high-level autonomy actions.
Provide technical reasoning to push back on engineering designs to ensure compliance with safety and regulatory requirements.
What we're looking for
Bachelor's degree or 4 years of relevant education and/or experience.
5+ years of hands-on software or site-reliability engineering experience, including building or operating production automation.
Experience operating in a regulated environment with exposure to risk, audit, or model governance review processes.
Strong programming ability in Python or a comparable language to read and critique automation code.
Demonstrated experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, or game-day testing using tools like AWS Fault Injection Service, Chaos Mesh, or Gremlin.
Experience with approval-gated or policy-controlled execution systems and producing control evidence for risk or audit functions.
Experience investigating production incidents to root cause, specifically those involving misbehaving automation.
Must be able to work on-site in San Antonio, TX 5 days per week.
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