Staff AI/ML Engineer, Developer Productivity

General Motors; Washington; Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 284,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellbeing benefits

Retirement savings plan

GM vehicle discounts

Job summary

General Motors seeks a Staff Engineer for the AV Developer Tools team to broaden developer productivity across GM’s cloud-based services and on-device tooling. You will lead a team focused on scalable, reliable toolchains, and guide the engineering culture while balancing business needs with user impact.

You will mentor engineers, drive roadmap decisions, evaluate new technologies, and ship improvements that measurably boost productivity and production reliability for GM’s AV initiatives.

Qualifications

• 5+ years designing, building and operating production systems at scale in the cloud.
• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience.
• Experience designing highly scalable, reliable, and maintainable services.
• Experience writing in Go, Python, or other languages at production scale.
• Understanding of Unix/Linux, SSH, and networking fundamentals.
• Attention to detail, and a desire to improve processes and systems around you.
• Ability to lead and influence others, both internal and external to the team.
• Ability to research, document, communicate, and defend proposals, and provide and take critical feedback.
• Ability to effectively make trade-offs and communicate the reasoning.
• Ability to manage competing priorities, focus on shipping, and work effectively under pressure.
• Passion for mentoring and growing junior engineers.
• Passion for self-driving technology and its potential impact on the world.

Responsibilities

• Identify engineering pain points and propose/design/implement solutions that are reliable, scalable, and maintainable
• Influence the team’s technical roadmap
• Evaluate new tools and technologies through PoCs
• Ship improvements to our AV development toolchains and services which have a measurable and direct impact on engineering productivity and our core company metrics
• Drive software engineering best practices within your team, and create tooling which encourages these
• Help steer the engineering culture on the team
• Guide the team to find the right balance between delivering impact and addressing technical debt
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team
• Set the example for high levels of accountability
• Execute and deliver impact both individually and through the team
• Set strong boundaries when selecting external requests and pushing back on requests that do not align with our team vision

Skills

Go

Python

Unix/Linux

Networking fundamentals

Mentoring

Leadership

Trade-offs

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or related

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

GCP

Job description

About Us

The AI Cloud and Developer Productivity organization is responsible for delivering and maintaining the tools and services engineers here at GM use every day to do their best work and drive our cars forward. Tools and services we work on enhancing the entire development process of engineers at GM — how/where code is checked out, modified, compiled, tested, merged, and eventually deployed. Our goal is to ensure our AV engineers and others here have world class tools and a seamless development experience so that they can focus on the problems that matter most in their domain.

Job Description

About Us

The AI Cloud and Developer Productivity organization is responsible for delivering and maintaining the tools and services engineers here at GM use every day to do their best work and drive our cars forward. Tools and services we work on enhancing the entire development process of engineers at GM — how/where code is checked out, modified, compiled, tested, merged, and eventually deployed. Our goal is to ensure our AV engineers and others here have world class tools and a seamless development experience so that they can focus on the problems that matter most in their domain.

The Role

We are looking for a Staff Engineer with an extensive engineering background, experience using a variety of developer tools and technologies, and who is passionate about developer productivity. As a leader on this team, we are looking for someone who cares deeply about the technical development of other engineers on the team and can effectively balance the needs and priorities of the business, our users, and the growth of our engineers.

The way this engineer will deliver impact may vary depending on the situation, but they will be expected to be able to identify how they can best have impact with minimal guidance.

The Team

The AV Developer Tools team owns AI-native tools and services that enable others to deploy consistent and secure agentic workflows with visibility into their usage, both hosted and on-device. We are part of the AI Cloud and Developer Productivity organization and own building blocks that allow customers to easily instrument their products to debug, optimize, reach, and maintain production level reliability and availability. This includes setting best practices and providing opinionated drop-in libraries and recommendations for service instrumentation. Our goal is to accelerate AV development by supporting developer workflows for performance and observability into their systems.

What You’ll Do (Responsibilities)

• Identify engineering pain points and propose/design/implement solutions that are reliable, scalable, and maintainable
• Influence the team’s technical roadmap
• Evaluate new tools and technologies through PoCs
• Ship improvements to our AV development toolchains and services which have a measurable and direct impact on engineering productivity and our core company metrics
• Drive software engineering best practices within your team, and create tooling which encourages these
• Help steer the engineering culture on the team
• Guide the team to find the right balance between delivering impact and addressing technical debt
• Mentor and grow engineers on the team
• Set the example for high levels of accountability
• Execute and deliver impact both individually and through the team
• Set strong boundaries when selecting external requests and pushing back on requests that do not align with our team vision

Minimum Qualifications (Must-Have)

• 5+ years of experience designing, building and operating production systems at scale in the cloud
• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience
• Experience designing highly scalable, reliable, and maintainable services
• Experience writing in Go, Python, or other languages at production scale
• Understanding of Unix/Linux, SSH, and networking fundamentals
• Attention to detail, and a desire to improve processes and systems around you
• Ability to lead and influence others, both internal and external to the team
• Ability to research, document, communicate, and defend proposals, and provide and take critical feedback
• Ability to effectively make trade-offs and communicate the reasoning
• Ability to manage competing priorities, focus on shipping, and work effectively under pressure
• Passion for mentoring and growing junior engineers
• Passion for self-driving technology and its potential impact on the world

Preferred Qualifications (Nice-to-Have)

• Demonstrated application of LLMs, skills, and MCPs to coding & review workflows
• Experience working with GCP
• Experience working with Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience owning or contributing to Open-Source projects

Compensation

The compensation information is a good faith estimate only. It is based on what a successful applicant might be paid in accordance with applicable state laws. The compensation may not be representative for positions located outside of New York, Colorado, California, or Washington.

• The salary range for this role: is $180,000 to $284,000. 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.

#GM-AV-1

This role is categorized as hybrid. This means the selected candidate is expected to report to a specific location at least 3 times a week {or other frequency dictated by their manager}. Relocation benefits are available for candidates who qualify under company policy.

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.

Benefits Overview

From day one, we're looking out for your well-being–at work and at home–so you can focus on realizing your ambitions. Learn how GM supports a rewarding career that rewards you personally by visiting Total Rewards resources.

Non-Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunities (U.S.)

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.

All employment decisions are made on a non-discriminatory basis without regard to sex, race, color, national origin, citizenship status, religion, age, disability, pregnancy or maternity status, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran or protected veteran, or any other similarly protected status in accordance with federal, state and local laws.

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.

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.