Senior AI & Machine Learning Engineer

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

The Senior Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Engineer will be part of a dedicated AI engineering team that focuses on developing and implementing AI/ML solutions for all lines of business within USAA. This role provides excellent opportunities to learn and contribute to a variety of exciting areas including sentiment analysis and agentic AI applications to enable USAA to provide best in class service to our members with cutting edge technology. Responsibilities include data preprocessing, model training, building APIs, and building data pipelines.

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, or Plano, TX. Relocation assistance is not available for this position.

What you'll do:

• Consults with data scientists and business partners on approaches involving ML model development and implementation.

• Provides technical feedback on ML solutions within technical lead community.

• Leads the full life cycle of machine learning engineering to include analysis, solution design, data pipeline engineering, testing, deployment, scheduling, application integration, production support, API development, and application integration in support of GenAI applications, ML frameworks/libraires, and ML models.

• Configure, manage, and set up AI/ML infrastructure components in cloud/on-prem environments for projects and the AI/ML community stakeholders. This includes AWS, GCP, graph databases.

• Works with architects to influence and define ML model implementation patterns in complex environments.

• Understand complex model implementation requirements and how to recognize and apply appropriate design patterns throughout solution design and implementation.

• Designs and implements complex technical solutions for machine learning, artificial intelligence, GenAI, Creates proof of concepts and prototypes on highly complex solutions and presents to leadership to deliver on vision for solution.

• Assists in setting technical direction for the team and serves as a mentor to team members.

• Ensures 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; OR 4 years of relevant education and/or experience; and

• 6+ years of machine learning engineering, data engineering, or software development experience implementing data solutions.

• Extensive programming experience using Python, SQL, Java etc.

• Extensive data engineering experience.

• Experience with end to end delivering of machine learning and AI/GenAI solutions that includes building, integrating, and optimizing data pipelines; curating and modeling the data for various types of consumers/products and their pattern of usage to include data marts, data lake, and operational analytic applications.

• Experience completing multiple projects leveraging the agile methodology in implementing ML models.

• Experience leveraging ML Ops principles and implementing automated workflows.

• Demonstrated technical leadership experience

• Demonstrated ability to mentor junior members of the technical team in area of expertise.

• Knowledge of Data Science principles and methodologies.

• Knowledge of stochastic modeling, machine learning, or other advanced mathematical techniques.

• Effective communication skills, with the ability to present complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

• Expert knowledge of at least one cloud platform and relevant components e.g., AWS Sagemaker.

What sets you apart:

• Programming skills using FastAPI, OpenShift, Snowflake (or any similar platform), Java, etc.

• Financial services, insurance, banking, or other