Principal Autonomy Validation & Simulation Engineer

General Motors; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 239,000 - 366,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

GM vehicle discounts

Job summary

General Motors is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for Autonomy Behavior Validation to lead the technical direction of a production-grade counterfactual simulation product. You will reconstruct scenes from incidents and simulations, implement human road-user models, and drive scalable, auditable workflows that support safety decisions.

You’ll partner with Safety and other stakeholders to define requirements, benchmarks, and validation plans, while delivering repeatable validation

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in systems engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, human factors, or a related field.
• 10+ years of professional experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, vehicle development, simulation, systems engineering, human factors, or safety-critical validation.
• Proven record of evaluating autonomous vehicles for a commercial fleet, launch, supervised release, or other high-consequence product decisions.
• Strong understanding of human behavior modeling, driver response, perception and reaction time, vehicle dynamics, uncertainty, and the limits of model-based conclusions.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical strategy and architecture for counterfactual behavior evaluation and controlled scene perturbations.
• Lead the conversion of real incidents and simulation events into executable, repeatable scenarios with provenance preservation.
• Implement and validate road-user response models against benchmarks and requirements, including perception and reaction timing and maneuver selection.
• Define scalable pipelines for parameter extraction, scene reconstruction, counterfactual swaps, fuzzing, and large-scale analysis.
• Establish validation methods for the counterfactual product, including baseline comparisons and traceability to requirements.
• Collaborate across Behavior, Simulation, Safety, Human Factors, Legal, Product, and Operations to translate results into actionable engineering decisions.

Skills

Python

Systems engineering

Autonomous vehicles

Simulation

Leadership

Communication

Robotics

Data analysis

Education

Master’s degree in engineering or related field

Tools

Simulation pipelines

Counterfactual analysis

Provenance-traceable workflows

Job description

General Motors is seeking a Principal Software Engineer for Autonomy Behavior Validation to lead the technical direction of a production-grade counterfactual simulation product. You will reconstruct scenes from incidents and simulations, implement human road-user models, and drive scalable, auditable workflows that support safety decisions.

You’ll partner with Safety and other stakeholders to define requirements, benchmarks, and validation plans, while delivering repeatable validation