I'm running a number of batch jobs using SQL Server Agent as batch job manager.  A few new jobs were failing with the error"

The job failed.  Unable to determine if the owner (domain\user) of job NAME has server access (reason: Could not obtain information about Windows NT group/user  error code 0x54b. [SQLSTATE 42000] (Error 15404)).,00:00:39,0,0,,,,0

The owner of the SSA job and the step "Run as" accounts were different.  Both were admins on the server and had DBO rights to the database.  The job consisted of three steps - an OS step, and two SQL queries.  It failed to run when the two accounts differed; when they were both the same it worked.