Senior Software Systems Engineer, Autonomous Systems Validation Confidence

General Motors; Sunnyvale (CA); Hybrid; USD 153,000 - 234,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation benefits

Health and wellbeing benefits

Job summary

General Motors is seeking a Senior Software Systems Engineer in Sunnyvale to develop methods and software for measuring validation confidence in autonomous vehicle testing. You will work at the intersection of software, systems, simulation, statistics, and data science to answer questions about coverage, significance, and regression detection.

The role emphasizes turning complex validation questions into measurable criteria, building scalable pipelines, and communicating findings with precision

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, physics, applied mathematics, statistics, data science, or a related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience applying engineering or quantitative methods to physical, cyber‑physical, or real‑world systems.
• Ability to translate validation questions into measurable requirements, metrics, experiments, or decision criteria.

Responsibilities

• Develop scalable frameworks and methods for measuring validation confidence across simulation and real-world testing.
• Build tools and data pipelines for test execution, analysis, metric computation, scorecards, and confidence reporting.
• Evaluate simulation validity and road predictive power using defensible criteria; analyze data to identify uncertainty, regressions, and gaps in evidence.
• Translate validation claims and release questions into requirements, experiments, test suites, metrics, and decision criteria.
• Improve throughput, repeatability, and quality of validation workflows.
• Collaborate across simulation, safety, autonomy, and release teams and communicate conclusions clearly.

Skills

Python

C++

Quantitative methods

Education

Bachelor’s degree in engineering, physics, applied mathematics, statistics, data science, or related technical field

Tools

SQL

Data pipelines

Scientific computing

Test automation

Job description

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Software Systems Engineer to develop the methods, software, and quantitative evidence used to measure confidence in autonomous vehicle validation results. This role sits at the intersection of software engineering, systems engineering, simulation, statistics, and data science. You will help answer questions such as: Do our tests provide sufficient coverage? Are our metrics meaningful? Can simulation results predict real-world performance? How confidently can we detect a regression or support a release decision? This role is a strong fit for someone who has experience with both programming and physical or cyber‑physical systems such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, aerospace, industrial systems, or other complex engineered products.

What you’ll do

• Develop scalable frameworks and methods for measuring validation confidence across simulation and real‑world testing, including coverage, sampling, metric quality, statistical significance, and regression detection.
• Build tools and data pipelines for test execution, analysis, metric computation, scorecards, and confidence reporting.
• Evaluate simulation validity and road predictive power using measurable, defensible criteria; analyze test and vehicle data to identify uncertainty, pipeline issues, regressions, and gaps in evidence.
• Translate validation claims and release questions into requirements, experiments, test suites, metrics, and quantitative decision criteria.
• Improve the throughput, repeatability, and quality of validation workflows.
• Partner with simulation, safety, autonomy, and release teams, and communicate conclusions, assumptions, limitations, and recommendations clearly.

Required qualifications

• Strong programming skills in Python, C++, or a comparable language, with experience writing clear, testable, maintainable code.
• Experience applying engineering or quantitative methods to a physical, cyber‑physical, or other real‑world system.
• Ability to turn ambiguous validation questions into measurable requirements, metrics, experiments, or decision criteria, and investigate complex behavior using incomplete or noisy data.
• Ability to collaborate across disciplines and explain technical results with appropriate precision and context.
• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, physics, applied mathematics, statistics, data science, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with autonomous vehicles, robotics, simulation, aerospace, industrial automation, or another safety‑relevant engineered system.
• Experience with verification and validation, test automation, scenario generation, requirements‑based testing, or performance benchmarking.
• Experience designing coverage measures, scorecards, confidence metrics, or regression‑detection methods.
• Experience with simulation‑to‑real‑world correlation, predictive‑validity analysis, or comparing results across test environments.
• Applied knowledge of probability, statistics, experimental design, or data analysis, including hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, power analysis, sampling strategies, or precision and recall.
• Experience with data pipelines, SQL, scientific computing, or large‑scale test execution.
• Graduate degree or equivalent depth in engineering, physics, applied mathematics, statistics, data science, or a related field.

What success looks like

Validation results have clear, quantitative confidence and known limitations. Coverage, metrics, and sampling are tied to the claims and decisions they support. Regressions and progressions are detected reliably, simulation performance is evaluated against real‑world outcomes, and the evidence supports decisions about risk, readiness, and release.

Who will thrive in this role

You are interested in how to know whether a complex system is working, not only in how to implement one component. You enjoy moving between code, data, statistical models, experiments, and system‑level questions, and you are comfortable learning the physical and operational context needed to interpret results correctly. You may come from systems engineering, robotics, physics, mechanical or electrical engineering, applied mathematics, statistics, data science, or a related background. The common thread is the ability to program, reason quantitatively about physical systems, and apply both to the validation of a real system.

Compensation

• The salary range for this role: is $153,200 to $234,100. The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position.
• Bonus Potential: An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.
• Benefits: GM offers a variety of health and wellbeing benefit programs. Benefit options include medical, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Accounts, retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, paid vacation & holidays, tuition assistance programs, employee assistance program, GM vehicle discounts and more.
• This job may be eligible for relocation benefits.

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