Staff Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

generalmotors; Markham; Hybrid; CAD 209,000 - 279,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare and benefits

GM Vehicle Purchase Plan

Hybrid work flexibility

Job summary

General Motors is hiring a Staff Engineer to elevate data platforms with reliable, observable, and scalable infrastructure. You’ll bridge design, production operations, and incident response, influencing patterns across SRE, data engineering, and product teams.

You will help define reliable engineering standards, build AI-driven workflows, and own incident response while mentoring teams. This hybrid role reports to the Markham office three days a week.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in SRE, DevOps, or systems engineering, mentoring teams.
• Experience building cloud-native production systems (Azure/AWS/GCP).
• Strong observability and SRE practices with SLIs/SLOs.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of scalable, observable infrastructure for vehicle telemetry and platform ops.
• Lead production readiness across teams with reliable deployments and strong observability.
• Design and improve CI/CD pipelines with quality gates and safe rollbacks.
• Collaborate with SRE, product, and app teams on SLOs, monitoring, and runbooks.
• Develop AI workflows, validation and evaluation techniques for reliability.
• Automate incident triage, diagnostics, and remediation workflows.
• Participate in weekly on-call rotations with 12-hour shifts and incident leadership.
• Drive post-incident reviews to durable system fixes.
• Engage with internal customers to translate needs into reliable service outcomes.
• Mentor engineers and promote shared engineering patterns across teams.
• Balance reliability, performance, security, and cost under pressure.

Skills

SRE/DevOps

Cloud-native systems

Observability

On-call incident response

CI/CD pipelines

GitOps

Programming: Python/Go/Java

AI in software development

Communication

Leadership

Education

BS/MS/PhD in CS/Engineering/Math/Physics

Tools

Azure Databricks

Azure Event Hubs

AKS

Helm

Kustomize

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Argo CD

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Job description

Job Description

Vacancy Status

Yes - This posting is for an existing vacancy within the organization and is open to new applications. (Backfill)

AI Disclosure

As part of the application process, Artificial Intelligence will be used in the hiring process for this role

Work Arrangement

Hybrid: This role is categorized as hybrid. This means the successful candidate is expected to report to Markham office three times per week, at minimum.

About the role

General Motors is transforming the automotive landscape through its next-generation Software-Defined Vehicle platform. Data is central to that transformation, powering safety, personalization, energy optimization, operational decision-making, and connected customer experiences.

We are seeking a Staff Engineer to help make GM’s data platforms reliable, observable, operable, and scalable. This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who can move comfortably between system-level design, production operations, incident response, automation, and customer partnership.

You will help define and spread the engineering patterns that make services easier to operate. You will work with SRE, data engineering, infrastructure, developer experience, application, and product teams to improve reliability from design through production and continuously improve how the organization operates.

What you’ll do

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, fault-tolerant, and observable infrastructure supporting vehicle telemetry, data ingestion, and platform operations.

• Lead production readiness efforts across multiple teams—engaging directly in code, shaping reliability standards, guiding architectural improvements, and ensuring applications launch with resilient deployments, strong observability, and predictable operations.

• Design, implement, and improve CI/CD delivery pipelines that make releases repeatable, safe, observable, and fast. Establish appropriate quality gates, artifact promotion, deployment verification, progressive delivery, and rollback practices.

• Partner across SRE, product, and application teams to design and implement meaningful SLOs, SLIs, observability, monitoring and alerting, runbooks, and operational best practices.

• Build and improve reusable AI workflows, skills, and evaluations. Apply appropriate validation techniques, including regression testing, structured evaluations, and LLM-as-a-judge approaches where useful.

• Automate operational work, including incident intake, triage, diagnostics, remediation, evidence collection, service requests, and customer-facing status workflows.

• Participate in a weekly on-call rotation with 12-hour shifts; the rotation cycles every eight weeks. Lead incident response, communicate clearly under pressure, and coordinate effective mitigation and recovery.

• Participate in post-incident reviews and drive durable, system-level fixes that prevent recurrence rather than relying on short-term patches or repeated manual workarounds.

• Partner directly with internal customers to understand their needs, explain technical trade-offs, and improve service outcomes with tact, empathy, and clear communication.

• Influence technical direction across teams, mentor engineers, and raise engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, documentation, and hands-on leadership with cross-functional engineering projects.

• Balance reliability, performance, security, delivery speed, and cost when making technical decisions--especially under pressure.

What you bring

• 8+ years in SRE, DevOps, or systems engineering, including experience managing or mentoring high-impact teams.

• Track record of designing and building and maintaining high-scale, cloud-native systems in production (preferably Azure, AWS, or GCP).

• Hands-on experience architecting observability patterns, including standardized instrumentation, OTEL collector configuration, SLO/SLI definitions, and deploying observability resources like monitors, alerts, and dashboards.

• Strong understanding of production readiness, service ownership, SLOs, incident management, post-incident learning, and continuous reliability improvement.

• Experience participating in an on-call rotation and leading technical response to production incidents.

• Experience designing, operating, and improving CI/CD pipelines. Understanding of GitOps, release strategies, quality gates, deployment verification, progressive delivery, and safe rollback is expected.

• Strong programming ability in Python, Go, Java, or a comparable language, with disciplined code review, version control, testing, and maintainability practices.

• Familiarity with AI-assisted software development, LLM application practices, agentic workflows, and evaluation techniques.

• Ability to work effectively with internal customers, including in difficult or high-pressure situations, with professionalism, tact, and empathy.

• Excellent ownership attitude and the ability to operate with pace, judgment, and accountability in a high-velocity environment.

• Ability to influence without relying on formal authority and to increase adoption of shared engineering patterns.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills for both technical and non-technical audiences.

• BS / MS / PhD in computer science, engineering, physics, mathematics, or another relevant, technical field

Preferred experience

• Azure Databricks

• Azure Event Hubs

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

• Kubernetes configuration management with Helm and Kustomize

• Infrastructure as code, especially Terraform

• GitHub Actions, Argo CD, and GitOps-based deployment models

• Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, OpenTelemetry, or comparable observability platforms and tools

• LLM application development and testing with Promptfoo, agentic workflows and reusable AI skills with CoPilot

• Experience operating large-scale data ingestion, processing, and delivery systems such as Fivetran, Apache Flink, Kafka, and Pulsar

• Experience with vehicle telemetry, connected-vehicle platforms, or other high-volume event-driven systems

Why Join Us

This is more than an engineering role -- it's an opportunity to shape the future of mobility. At GM, you'll join a team committed to cutting-edge technology, sustainability, and inclusive innovation. With meaningful projects, a collaborative culture, and a global mission, your impact will be tangible and far-reaching.

Compensation

The salary range for this role is $147,000 to $196,600. The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position.

GM DOES NOT PROVIDE IMMIGRATION-RELATED SPONSORSHIP FOR THIS ROLE. DO NOT APPLY FOR THIS ROLE IF YOU WILLNEED GM IMMIGRATION SPONSORSHIP NOW OR IN THE FUTURE.

Benefits Overview

• Paid time off including vacation days, holidays, and supplemental benefits for pregnancy, parental and adoption leave;
• Healthcare, dental, and vision benefits;
• Life insurance plans to cover you and your family;
• Company and matching contributions to a Defined Contribution Pension plan to help you save for retirement;
• GM Vehicle Purchase Plan for you and your family.

About GM

Our vision is a world with Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions and Zero Congestion and we embrace the responsibility to lead the change that will make our world better, safer and more equitable for all.

Why Join Us

We believe we all must make a choice every day – individually and collectively – to drive meaningful change through our words, our deeds and our culture. Every day, we want every employee to feel they belong to one General Motors team.

Non-Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunities

General Motors is committed to being a workplace that is not only free of unlawful discrimination, but one that genuinely fosters inclusion and belonging. We strongly believe that providing an inclusive workplace creates an environment in which our employees can thrive and develop better products for our customers.
We encourage interested candidates to review the key responsibilities and qualifications for each role and apply for any positions that match their skills and capabilities. Applicants in the recruitment process may be required, where applicable, to successfully complete a role-related assessment(s) and/or a pre-employment screening prior to beginning employment. To learn more, visit How we Hire.

Accommodations

General Motors offers opportunities to all job seekers including individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation to assist with your job search or application for employment, email us or call us at 1-800-865-7580. In your email, please include a description of the specific accommodation you are requesting as well as the job title and requisition number of the position for which you are applying.