Staff Platform Engineer: Cloud Platform & Automation

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

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.