Staff Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

General Motors; Markham; On-site; CAD 203,000 - 271,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid time off

Healthcare, dental, and vision

Life insurance

Pension plan

GM Vehicle Purchase Plan

Job summary

General Motors in Markham, Ontario, is seeking a Staff Engineer to elevate GM's data platforms across observability, reliability, and scalable design. This senior role bridges system design, production operations, and incident response, partnering with SRE, data engineering, and product teams.

You will lead CI/CD pipelines, drive SRE practices, and mentor engineers while ensuring reliable deployments and strong operational visibility in a hybrid, office-plus-home work model.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in SRE, DevOps, or systems engineering.
• Experience designing and maintaining high-scale, cloud-native systems in production.
• Strong programming ability in Python, Go, Java, or similar.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and GitOps concepts.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted software development and LLM practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of scalable, observable infrastructure for telemetry, ingestion, and operations.
• Lead production readiness across teams, guiding reliability standards and deployments.
• Design and improve CI/CD pipelines for safe, fast releases.
• Establish quality gates, deployment verification, and progressive delivery practices.
• Partner with SRE, product, and application teams on SLOs/SLIs and monitoring.

Skills

SRE/DevOps

Cloud-native

Observability

CI/CD

Python/Go/Java

Education

BS/MS/PhD in CS/Engineering

Tools

Azure

AWS

GCP

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.

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.

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.

We are leading the change to make our world better, safer and more equitable for all through our actions and how we behave. Learn more about: Our Company Our Culture How we hire Our diverse team of employees bring their collective passion for engineering, technology and design to deliver on our vision of a world with Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions and Zero Congestion. We are looking for adventure-seekers and imaginative thought leaders to help us transform mobility. Explore our global locations We are determined to lead change for the world through technology, ingenuity and harnessing the creativity of our diverse team. Join us to help lead the change that will make our world better, safer and more equitable for all by becoming a member of GM's Talent Community (beamery.com). As a part of our Talent Community, you will receive updates about GM, open roles, career insights and more.