AI-DLC Engineering Lead

Why USAA?

At USAA, our mission is to empower our members to achieve financial security through highly competitive products, exceptional service and trusted advice. We seek to be the #1 choice for the military community and their families.

Embrace a fulfilling career at USAA, where our core values – honesty, integrity, loyalty and service – define how we treat each other and our members. Be part of what truly makes us special and impactful.

We are proud to support active-duty military spouses. USAA roles may offer remote or hybrid flexibility for active-duty military spouses consistent with applicable policy and business needs.

The Opportunity

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. Relocation assistance is not available for this position.

As a dedicated AI-DLC Engineering Lead, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for our association-wide transformation of the software development lifecycle. Reporting directly to the executive accountable for AI-DLC, you will help advance the association from AI-assisted development, where tools support individual activities and results vary across teams, to an AI-driven delivery model where AI advances the workflow, people govern decisions at defined gates, and approved outputs deliver measurable value.

You will lead the engineering discipline for the next horizon of AI-DLC, translate transformation needs into prioritized technical requirements, and guide the AI Platform engineering team in delivering reusable capabilities. You will work across Lines of Business, Association Functions, architecture, IT Governance, API Management, security, risk, and engineering teams to integrate AI-driven workflows into established software delivery practices.

This is a hands-on engineering leadership role for someone who can connect strategy to implementation. You will establish technical direction, build reference implementations, evaluate emerging approaches, resolve technical barriers, and turn implementation feedback into scalable platform, tooling, and process improvements.

The role requires deep software engineering, cloud, DevSecOps, and SDLC expertise combined with practical experience implementing AI coding agents, agentic workflows, specification-driven development, human approval gates, and production controls. AI-DLC extends AI beyond code generation into requirements, architecture, planning, testing, deployment, operations, and maintenance.

What you'll do:

• Lead the engineering discipline and provide hands-on technical direction for association-wide AI-DLC adoption.
• Translate AI-DLC transformation needs into prioritized engineering requirements and guide the AI Platform engineering team.
• Design AI-driven workflows across requirements, architecture, planning, implementation, testing, security validation, release authorization, deployment, and production feedback.
• Establish human decision gates, engineering standards, reference architectures, reusable patterns, and production-readiness expectations.
• Build reference implementations and integrate AI-DLC with repositories, development environments, CI/CD pipelines, testing, security, change, release, and monitoring capabilities.
• Optimize platform capabilities through reusable services, components, APIs, agent tools, templates, instructions, evaluation frameworks, and integration patterns.
• Partner with Lines of Business and Association Functions to deliver consistent capabilities with extensibility points for specialized vertical needs.
• Partner with IT Governance to embed policies, standards, controls, approvals, evidence collection, and exception handling into AI-driven workflows.
• Partner with API Management to promote reusable APIs and services, improve the software development tooling stack, and enable scalable access to enterprise capabilities.
• Apply AWS, software engineering, cloud, DevSecOps, and Site Reliability Engineering expertise to integrate AI-driven workflows into established delivery practices.
• Define secure patterns for agent context, tools, APIs, knowledge, identity, permissions, execution environments, failure handling, and output validation.
• Develop automated evaluations and quality gates for AI-generated requirements, designs, code, tests, security findings, and release artifacts.
• Use implementation feedback and production insights to reduce manual effort, rework, duplication, and inconsistent practices.
• Define measures for adoption, engineering capacity, cycle time, quality, automation, control effectiveness, developer experience, and business outcomes.
• Guide technical decisions involving architecture, dependencies, risks, governance, integrations, platform constraints, and capability sequencing.
• Lead cross-functional engineering efforts, mentor engineers, and serve as a trusted technical advisor to the executive accountable for AI-DLC.
• Ensure risks associated with business activities are effectively identified, measured, monitored, and controlled in accordance with risk and compliance policies and procedures.

What you have:

• Bachelor's degree in a related field; OR four years of relevant education and/or experience.
• Eight years of broad software engineering, platform engineering, cloud engineering, DevOps, developer productivity, or related technology experience.
• Three years of demonstrated technical leadership for complex, cross-functional, portfolio-level, or enterprise engineering initiatives.
• Six years of experience delivering technology solutions across multiple phases of the software development lifecycle, including requirements, architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, production support, modernization, and optimization.
• Experience leading an enterprise transformation involving AI-assisted development, agentic software engineering, AI-native development, or AI-driven software delivery.
• Experience implementing AI across multiple SDLC phases rather than limiting AI use to code completion or individual developer productivity.
• Extensive experience designing and implementing secure, resilient, scalable, observable, and maintainable software platforms or distributed systems used by multiple engineering teams.
• Demonstrated ability to establish technical direction, reference architectures, engineering standards, reusable patterns, platform capabilities, and production-readiness practices.
• Advanced software engineering experience in Python or another modern programming language, including APIs, integrations, automation, distributed systems, testing, and production-quality services.
• Advanced experience with public cloud architecture, DevSecOps, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, automated testing, observability, incident response, and Site Reliability Engineering.
• Demonstrated experience integrating new engineering capabilities into established software development processes, delivery pipelines, security controls, and operational practices.
• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture, code, design, security, control, and implementation reviews and resolve complex cross-system technical issues.
• Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous transformation needs into technical strategy, prioritized requirements, solution architectures, implementation roadmaps, and measurable outcomes.
• Demonstrated experience influencing senior leaders and communicating complex technical decisions, risks, dependencies, sequencing considerations, and recommendations across organizational boundaries.
• Strong business acumen in technology investment, engineering productivity, operational management, cost optimization, risk management, and organizational change.
• Experience mentoring experienced engineers and leading technical work across teams without relying exclusively on direct reporting authority.

What sets you apart:

• Experience leading an enterprise transformation involving AI-assisted development, agentic software engineering, AI-native development, or AI-driven software delivery.
• Experience implementing AI across multiple SDLC phases rather than limiting AI use to code completion or individual developer productivity.
• Hands-on experience with AI coding and software engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot, Amazon Q Developer, Kiro, Claude Code, or comparable enterprise development assistants.
• Experience designing workflows where AI develops plans, requirements, specifications, code, tests, documentation, and other engineering artifacts while people retain decision authority at defined gates.
• Experience with specification-driven development, structured requirements, repository-based context engineering, reusable agent instructions, coding standards, and machine-readable engineering artifacts.
• Experience creating or integrating specialized coding agents, custom agents, agent skills, agent tools, reusable prompts, repository instructions, hooks, and workflow steering rules.
• Experience integrating AI agents with repositories, issues, pull requests, code review, automated testing, security scanning, build pipelines, deployment pipelines, and release controls.
• Experience with Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, or comparable services for foundation-model access, agent runtime, identity, tool connectivity, memory, and observability.
• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, AWS Strands Agents, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or comparable frameworks.
• Experience implementing Model Context Protocol, secure agent tools, API-based integrations, agent identity, delegated authorization, least-privilege access, or sandboxed execution.
• Experience designing human-in-the-loop controls, approval of workflows, automated evaluations, release thresholds, audit trails, traceability, and evidence collection for AI-generated engineering outputs.
• Experience integrating AI-enabled delivery with platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, Jira, Confluence, Rovo, ServiceNow, API management platforms, knowledge repositories, workflow engines, and developer portals.
• Experience with IBM watsonx.governance or comparable capabilities supporting AI inventory, risk management, evaluations, monitoring, controls, exceptions, and governance evidence.
• Experience defining measures for AI-DLC adoption and performance, including cycle time, throughput, quality, rework, defect escape, automated task completion, human intervention, control effectiveness, developer experience, and cost.
• Experience conducting forward-deployed or embedded engineering engagements that validate solutions with delivery teams and convert repeatable patterns into shared capabilities.
• Experience building reusable services, APIs, templates, SDKs, platform components, and implementation accelerators.
• Experience leading technical change across a federated enterprise where common capabilities must support specialized business and technology needs.
• Demonstrated ability to remain hands-on while influencing engineering teams, architects, governance partners, product leaders, and senior executives.

USAA does not provide visa sponsorship for this role. Please do not apply for this role if at any time (now or in the future) you will need immigration support (i.e., H-1B, TN, STEM OPT Training Plans, etc.).

Compensation: USAA has an effective process for assessing market data and establishing ranges to ensure we remain competitive. You are paid within the salary range based on your experience and market data of the position. The actual salary for this role may vary by location.

Employees may be eligible for pay incentives based on overall corporate and individual performance and at the discretion of the USAA Board of Directors.

The above description reflects the details considered necessary to describe the principal functions of the job and should not be construed as a detailed description of all the work requirements that may be performed in the job.

Benefits: At USAA our employees enjoy best-in-class benefits to support their physical, financial, and emotional wellness. These benefits include comprehensive medical, dental and vision plans, 401(k), pension, life insurance, parental benefits, adoption assistance, paid time off program with paid holidays plus 16 paid volunteer hours, and various wellness programs. Additionally, our career path planning and continuing education assists employees with their professional goals.

For more details on our outstanding benefits, visit our benefits page on USAAjobs.com.

Applications for this position are accepted on an ongoing basis, this posting will remain open until the position is filled. Thus, interested candidates are encouraged to apply the same day they view this posting.

USAA is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.