AJ Zisman
San Antonio
Summary
Software Engineer with over 17 years of professional experience leading high performing agile teams that support multi-billion dollar payment processing systems. Looking to increase my impact at USAA by leading as a Senior Manager in IT.
Overview
18
18
years of professional experience
Work History
Senior Software Engineer
USAA
01.2022 - Current
- Payments Tech Lead for Run IT Program
- Tech leading a team of three agile/kanban teams responsible for all Payments Run the Business work in 2025
- Responsible for transforming the Run IT program to a managed 3P service model
- Instrumental in forming team structure and defining duties between 3P and FTEs
- Wires Volante Testing Team Lead
- Currently leading the Volpay testing team (30+ members) to resolve all of Volante’s critical and severe defects before and after the USAA go-live with Volante
- Worked to enable support of the FED’s new ISO20022 standard – enabling USAA to continue being a bank
- Directly influenced future of new Volpay Wires vendor by steering business stakeholders
- Vetted and onboarded supplementary agile teams to meet critical go/no-go timelines
- Daily communication with EMG leadership on overall status of testing
- Wires Run The Business Tech Lead
- Built the Wires maintenance team from the ground up into a high performing geographically distributed agile team
- Met critical CIO timelines to migrate Wires servers to new COLO data center
- Primary on-call escalation point of contact for Wires IT
- Drove direction for retiring classic Wires technology stacks
- Tech led the team in building robust REST API designs
- Presented monthly updates on Wires to the Payment Rails Governance Meeting to all Payments stakeholders
- Performed infrastructure and system upgrades for 20+ micro services and the core Wire Transfer Application
- Collaborated with executives and other SRE leads across the department to formulate the overall SRE strategy for the Payments department and for Wires
- Defect management for new Domestic and International Wires Experiences as well as new Volante Integration Services
- Led interview process to onboard new software engineers across all Wires agile teams
- Team with manager to review budget, implement cost savings measures, contractor reviews, Fieldglass onboarding
- Mentored junior developers and trained on-site/nearshore/offshore contractors to improve skillset of the Wires team
- IT summer intern manager
- Led multiple IT audits from various groups inside and outside of USAA as audit lead for Wires
- Handled vulnerability management across services and servers as tech lead for the Wires Maintenance Team
- Authored, maintained, and executed new and existing plans as Disaster Recovery lead for Wires
Software Engineer I
USAA
01.2012 - 01.2022
- Developed numerous REST APIs for Wires Applications
- Developed and maintained Classic Websphere APIs for USAA’s Credit Card processing application (Clear Commerce)
- Led multiple upgrades for USAA’s ACH processing (PEP+), Credit Card processing, and Wire processing systems
- Decoupled automatic payment plans from USAA’s Credit Card application to prepare for new vendor
- Led teamwide effort to migrate multiple payment applications to newly constructed DFW data center
- Updated and maintained all wires batch jobs to conform to USAA batch standards
- Performed disaster recovery exercises for Credit Card, ACH and Wires applications as team disaster recovery lead
- Interviewed software engineering candidates and mentored new hires for multiple products (Wires Transfers, Credit Cards, ACH)
- Regularly triage production and test outages with Firewall, Network, Database and Server teams
- Led Payments Change Review Group to review and signoff all changes within the Payments department
- Collaborated with executives and managers across payments teams to set change and release strategy
- Onboarded and trained a team of change reviewers across payments
Software Engineer II
USAA
01.2010 - 01.2012
- Created fraud rules that halted millions of dollars in daily fraud losses
- Supported and maintained applications that enabled member credit card usage across all USAA products
- Migrated our encrypted credit cards to industry standard encryption keys
- Implemented the Mass Reissue automated process to automatically update Credit Cards used for insurance payments
- Led the Credit Card Audit as tech lead for the Clear Commerce application
Software Engineer III
USAA
01.2009 - 01.2010
- Supported and maintained BillPay, Funds Transfer, ACH, Wire Transfers and Clear Commerce applications
- Trained contractors and new employees to support multiple money movement applications
IT Intern
USAA
01.2007 - 01.2009
- Supported code repository application at USAA (Starteam)
- Helped to develop Websphere infrastructure security applications
- Managed licensing servers for multiple applications used at USAA
- Developed document management applications
- Helped to migrate from Solaris to Linux for document management applications
Education
BBA - Information Systems
The University of Texas at San Antonio
06.2009
Skills
- Technical Skills: Jira, Confluence, SpringBoot, Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab, Gradle, Oracle SQL, UDB(DB2), IBM Websphere, IBM Message Broker, Control-M, Splunk, Kibana, Kafka, Java, KSH/BASH, CI/CD, AWS
HIGHLIGHTS
- 17+ years of software engineering experience leading across multiple payment IT teams
- Tech led multiple agile teams to successfully migrate our existing Wire Transfer system to the new Wires Volpay system
- Payments Run IT Program Tech Lead over BillPay, Funds Transfer, P2P, RDC/Checks, Payments Infrastructure, Connected Accounts and Wires
- Experienced with building and leading full stack IT teams
- Curated fraud rules that have stopped millions in daily credit card fraud losses
- Experienced in training and coaching team members to help them effectively deliver products and services with exceptional quality
- Ability to cultivate a blameless culture amongst teams while instilling a strong sense of ownership of the product
- Vast knowledge across infrastructure, data, and application domains here at USAA
- Extensive troubleshooting and problem-solving experience with multiple USAA payment applications
- Ability to effectively explain technical concepts to technical and non-technical EMG/non-EMG audiences
- Led Audit Regulatory and Compliance Strategy across Credit Card, ACH, and Wire Transfer Applications
Timeline
Senior Software Engineer
USAA
01.2022 - Current
Software Engineer I
USAA
01.2012 - 01.2022
Software Engineer II
USAA
01.2010 - 01.2012
Software Engineer III
USAA
01.2009 - 01.2010
IT Intern
USAA
01.2007 - 01.2009
BBA - Information Systems
The University of Texas at San Antonio