Senior Principal Engineer — Autonomy Evaluation Architect

General Motors; United States; Remote; USD 250,000 - 385,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellbeing benefits

GM vehicle discounts

Tuition assistance programs

Job summary

General Motors Company seeks a Principal Engineer in Autonomy Evaluation to own how we evaluate autonomous driving systems, from overall behavior to subsystems. You will prototype and land code, mentor Staff and Senior engineers, and collaborate with Autonomy, Simulation, Safety, and Software Validation teams to deliver trustworthy release decisions.

You will design statistically sound evaluations, quantify driving quality, and translate observations into actionable recommendations for

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in autonomous systems, robotics, ML evaluation, or applied data science, with a track record of turning analysis into decisions and shipped improvements.
• A track record of creating new evaluation or measurement methods that were adopted beyond your own team.
• Deep experience designing statistically sound evaluations of dynamic systems, including sampling, confidence intervals, experimental design, hypothesis testing, and the precision and recall of classifiers on time-series data.

Responsibilities

• Set the multi-year technical direction for evaluation. Decide which questions matter most, which methods to invest in, and which to retire.
• Invent new ways to judge overall driving behavior, such as learned or VLM-based judges of driving quality, comparison with how expert humans drive, counterfactual and closed-loop analysis, and discovery of unknown failure modes in the long tail.
• Define how we evaluate subsystems such as perception, prediction, planning, and localization, including learned components, with metrics that reflect each subsystem's real effect on driving rather than accuracy alone.
• Trace bad driving back to the subsystem or interaction that caused it, and measure how subsystem errors add up to driving outcomes.
• Define how we tell whether a software or model change actually improves driving, including regression detection and version-to-version comparison, so engineering teams and release reviews get trustworthy answers quickly.
• Turn observed behavior into measured, ranked problems. Size issues with metrics and scene classifiers, build a Pareto of the problem space, and drive fixes with the teams that own them.
• Own the scientific rigor of evaluation: sampling, statistical confidence, metric validity, and agreement between simulation and road results. Make every result's assumptions and limits explicit, and resolve the hardest disagreements between signals, such as simulation versus road or a subsystem metric versus a driving metric.
• Turn results into clear recommendations for engineering and leadership: what changed, how confident we are, and what to do next.
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers through research and design reviews and written technical direction.

Skills

Autonomous systems

ML evaluation

Python

SQL

C++

Statistical design

Stakeholder engagement

Mentorship

Leadership without authority

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Robotics / EE

Master's degree or PhD in related field

Tools

Linux

Git

Jupyter

Job description

General Motors Company seeks a Principal Engineer in Autonomy Evaluation to own how we evaluate autonomous driving systems, from overall behavior to subsystems. You will prototype and land code, mentor Staff and Senior engineers, and collaborate with Autonomy, Simulation, Safety, and Software Validation teams to deliver trustworthy release decisions.

You will design statistically sound evaluations, quantify driving quality, and translate observations into actionable recommendations for