Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

General Motors; United States; Hybrid; USD 172,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

GM Vehicle Autonomy is building a centralized SRE team to make reliability a measurable property of autonomous-vehicle software. You will help define standards, write automation, and partner with infra teams to operate reliably without heroics.

As a founding SRE, you will co‑found the practice, build shared tooling, and drive blameless post‑incident processes while enabling teams to manage risk with meaningful SLIs/SLOs.

Qualifications

• Significant experience as an SRE/Production Engineer operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience taking an SRE/operational excellence program from 0 to 1 or improving maturity.
• Strong software engineering ability in at least one general-purpose language.
• Deep systems knowledge across Linux, networking, Kubernetes, cloud, CI/CD, or observability.
• Hands-on experience defining SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, actionable alerts, and on-call health.
• Ability to build consensus and drive adoption of standards across teams.

Responsibilities

• Co‑found the SRE Practice: translate reliability charter into engineering systems and adoption paths.
• Build the Paved Road: design shared reliability tooling for cataloging, SLOs, error budgets, and toil reduction.
• Define the Standards: establish an architecture with minimum standards and golden paths.
• Drive Incident Excellence: partner with Incident Management on severity, response standards, and post‑incident actions.
• Partner with Service Owners: classify critical services, map dependencies, and define SLIs/SLOs.
• Protect Engineering Capacity: turn toil into reusable software and reduce manual ops.

Skills

SRE experience

SRE program leadership

Go/Python/Java/C++

Linux

Networking

Kubernetes

Cloud infrastructure

CI/CD

Observability

SLOs/SLIs

On-call health

Cross-team collaboration

Decision making under ambiguity

Autonomous vehicles

Hybrid cloud

Data/ML platforms

Service catalogs

Production readiness automation

Reliability scorecards

Policy-as-code

Game days / failure injection

Tools

Go

Python

Java

C++

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

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

We believe we all must make a choice every day - individually and collectivel