Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

General Motors; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 172,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellbeing benefits

GM vehicle discounts

Retirement savings plan

Tuition assistance programs

Paid vacation & holidays

Employee assistance program

Job summary

GM Vehicle Autonomy is building a centralized Site Reliability Engineering team to make reliability a measurable, engineered property of autonomous-vehicle software. As a founding SRE, you will establish core governance, write production automation, and partner with infrastructure teams to operate reliably without heroics.

You will define standards, design shared tooling for SLOs, error budgets, and incident response, and collaborate with service owners to map dependencies and meaningful

Qualifications

• Significant experience as an SRE, Production Engineer, or Infrastructure Software Engineer operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience taking an SRE or operational excellence program from 0 to 1, or materially improving a program in an organization with uneven reliability maturity.
• Strong software engineering ability in at least one general-purpose language (Go, Python, Java, C++, etc.).
• Deep systems knowledge across Linux, networking, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, or observability.
• Practical, hands-on experience defining SLIs/SLOs, using error budgets, designing actionable alerts, and improving on-call health.
• The ability to build consensus and drive adoption of standards across teams without taking away their ownership of the underlying services.
• Sound judgment under ambiguity: distinguish urgent operational symptoms from the engineering work required to prevent recurrence.

Responsibilities

• Co-found the SRE Practice: Translate reliability charter into working systems, adoption paths, and measurable outcomes.
• Build the Paved Road: Create shared reliability tooling for service cataloging, SLOs, error budgets, readiness evidence, and toil reduction.
• Define the Standards: Establish a risk-based production reliability architecture, minimum standards, golden paths, and a time-bound exception process.
• Drive Incident Excellence: Partner with Incident Management to operationalize severity, command, and response standards; establish blameless post-incident practices.
• Partner with Service Owners: Help teams classify critical services, map dependencies, identify failure modes, and establish meaningful SLIs/SLOs.
• Protect Engineering Capacity: Decline toil transfer and convert repeated manual work into reusable software.

Skills

SRE

Production Engineer

Infrastructure Software Engineer

Go

Python

Java

C++

Linux

Kubernetes

Cloud infrastructure

CI/CD

Observability

SLIs/SLOs

Incident Management

Reliability tooling

Stakeholder collaboration

Job description

Job Description

GM Vehicle Autonomy is forming a centralized Site Reliability Engineering team to make reliability a measurable, engineered property of the systems used to build, validate, release, and operate autonomous-vehicle software.

As one of our founding SREs, you will have the unique opportunity to take this program from 0 to 1. You will not be an embedded support engineer or a centralized help desk. Instead, you will establish the core governance layer, define pragmatic standards, write production automation, and partner with infrastructure teams to help them operate reliably without depending on heroics.

If you are an expert in SRE practices who loves building the machine that builds the machine, this is your chance to shape the reliability culture for the future of autonomous driving.

What You’ll Do

• Co‑found the SRE Practice: Translate our reliability charter into working engineering systems, adoption paths, and measurable outcomes.
• Build the Paved Road: Design and build shared reliability tooling and automation for service cataloging, SLOs, error budgets, readiness evidence, and toil reduction.
• Define the Standards: Establish a risk-based production reliability architecture, minimum standards, golden paths, and a time-bound exception process.
• Drive Incident Excellence: Partner with Incident Management to operationalize severity, command, and response standards. Establish blameless post‑incident practices and ensure corrective actions are tracked and completed.
• Partner with Service Owners: Help teams classify critical services, map dependencies, identify failure modes, and establish meaningful SLIs/SLOs based on developer, vehicle, or operator outcomes.
• Protect Engineering Capacity: Decline toil transfer and turn repeated manual operational work into reusable software.

Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications)

• Significant experience as an SRE, Production Engineer, or Infrastructure Software Engineer operating large‑scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience taking an SRE or operational excellence program from 0 to 1, or materially improving a program in an organization with uneven reliability maturity.
• Strong software engineering ability in at least one general‑purpose language (Go, Python, Java, C++, etc.).
• Deep systems knowledge across several domains: Linux, networking, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, or observability.
• Practical, hands‑on experience defining SLIs/SLOs, using error budgets, designing actionable alerts, and improving on‑call health.
• The ability to build consensus and drive adoption of standards across teams without taking away their ownership of the underlying services.
• Sound judgment under ambiguity: you can distinguish urgent operational symptoms from the engineering work required to prevent recurrence.

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge (Preferred Qualifications)

• Experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, safety‑relevant systems, automotive software, or another high‑consequence production environment.
• Experience with hybrid cloud/on‑premises environments and foundational platform services.
• Experience with data or ML platforms, including data freshness, distributed training, model artifacts, or model serving.
• Experience building service catalogs, production‑readiness automation, reliability scorecards, or policy‑as‑code.
• Experience facilitating game days, failure injection, regional failover, or disaster‑recovery exercises.

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 $172,000 to $300,000. 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.

Relocation

This job may be eligible for relocation benefits.

Remote/Hybrid: This role is based in Sunnyvale, CA or Austin, TX if you live within a 50-mile radius of an office location you are expected to report to that location three times a week, at minimum.

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

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Benefits Overview

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