Staff Platform Engineer, Cloud Platform

General Motors; Warren (MI); On-site; USD 160,000 - 333,000; Full time

Job summary

General Motors is seeking a Staff-level engineer to own and advance GM's cloud platform. You will design, build, and operate core platform capabilities across the control plane, runtimes, and infrastructure that power GM's internal software systems.

You will lead with hands-on coding, set technical direction, and raise the bar for engineering standards. Expect collaboration with SRE, application teams, and AI-assisted tooling to drive reliability and developer productivity.

Qualifications

• Ten+ years building and operating production infra or platforms.
• Strong production coding in Go or equivalent language.
• Experience designing internal developer platforms or cloud control planes.
• Expertise with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Crossplane, or Kubernetes operators).
• Solid grounding in cloud networking and security, preferably Azure.
• Track record of improving reliability with SLOs and observability.
• Strong product sense for developer experience and UX of CLIs and docs.
• Judgment to simplify and remove unnecessary systems.
• Clear written communication and ability to align stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design and build core platform capabilities end to end, from API design through production operations.
• Set technical direction for one or more platform areas and write design documents for the team.
• Eliminate toil and platform instability with code and automation rather than process.
• Build golden paths so the recommended approach is the easiest.
• Use AI tooling (Cursor, Claude Code and agents) to build and expose platform capabilities.
• Partner with SRE on reliability, on-call and incident reviews and meet measurable SLOs.
• Mentor senior engineers, review designs and code across teams.
• Collaborate with application teams to remove platform friction.

Skills

Kubernetes at scale

Go programming

Developer platform design

Infrastructure as code

Cloud networking & security

SLOs & observability

Technical communication

Keep things simple

Tools

Terraform

Crossplane

Kubernetes operators

ArgoCD

Karpenter

Job description

About the role

We want the experience of building and running software on GM's cloud to be as good as or better than what our engineers get from the best developer platforms on their own projects. Pushing code should be quick, getting a namespace or a database should take minutes, and production should stay up without heroics. We are not there yet, and that gap is the job.

This is a Staff-level, hands-on engineering role that spans the whole cloud platform. You will work across GM's internal cloud platform, the foundations underneath it, the control plane that developers interact with, and the runtime that keeps workloads healthy. You will write code, set technical direction, and raise the bar for the engineers around you.

We are hiring a small number of very strong engineers for this. If you have built a scaled platform that people chose to use because it was the easiest path, we want to talk to you.

What you'll work on

You will go where the hardest problems are, and today those include:

• A platform people choose. Build the default way to ship software at GM so that it is easier than going around it. Move existing workloads onto it without downtime, and keep improving it based on what slows teams down.
• Self-service infrastructure. Replace hand-built and ticket-driven provisioning with declarative, API-driven infrastructure, covering networking, identity and accounts.
• Interfaces for people and agents. Design the APIs, CLI and MCP tools that engineers and AI agents use to get work done. Keep them simple and consistent, so no one needs another person in the loop to ship.
• Reliability at scale. Design for availability and scale, including cell-based and multi-region architecture. Partner with SRE to define SLOs that mean something and remove the failures that page people at night.
• Fast, safe delivery. Make the path from merge to production quick and boring, with promotion, rollback and policy built in.

What you'll do

• Design and build core platform capabilities end to end, from API design through production operations.
• Set technical direction for one or more platform areas and write the design documents that the rest of the team builds from.
• Find the biggest sources of developer toil and platform instability, and eliminate them with code and automation rather than process or headcount.
• Build golden paths so that the right way to ship at GM is also the easiest way.
• Use AI tooling (Cursor, Claude Code and agents) as a normal part of how you build, and help make the platform itself usable by agents through APIs and MCP.
• Partner with SRE on reliability, on-call and incident reviews, and hold the platform to measurable SLOs.
• Mentor senior engineers, review designs and code across teams, and model the engineering standards we want.
• Work directly with application teams to understand where the platform gets in their way, then fix it.

What we’re looking for

Ten or more years building and operating production infrastructure or platforms, including several years in a senior or staff role with technical leadership across teams.

• Deep, hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production at scale, including cluster operations, multi-tenancy, autoscaling and upgrades.
• Strong software engineering skills in Go or a comparable language. You write production code, not only configuration.
• Experience designing and running an internal developer platform, PaaS or cloud control plane that other engineers depend on.
• Expertise with infrastructure as code and declarative provisioning (Terraform, Crossplane, or Kubernetes operators and controllers).
• Solid grounding in cloud networking, identity and security, preferably on Azure.
• A track record of improving reliability with SLOs, observability and blameless incident practice.
• Strong product sense for developer experience. You care about the CLI output, the error message and the docs as much as the architecture.
• The judgment to simplify. You would rather delete a system than add another one.
• Clear written communication and the ability to bring a skeptical room along with a good design.

Nice to have

• Experience with Istio or another service mesh, Gateway API, ArgoCD, Kargo, KEDA, Karpenter or Kyverno.
• Built or migrated a large platform with zero downtime for tenants.
• Experience with event streaming platforms such as Azure Event Hubs or Kafka.
• Experience with cell-based or multi-region architectures.
• Built MCP servers or other interfaces designed for AI agents.
• Experience with cloud cost optimization and FinOps data pipelines.
• Contributions to open source projects in the cloud native ecosystem.

Compensation

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 salary range for this role is $160,200-$333,400 . The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position, as well as the geog

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