Staff Software Engineer - Developer Experience

General Motors; United States; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

General Motors Company is seeking a Staff Software Engineer - Developer Experience to join the DevEx team at the intersection of data, tooling, and engineering strategy. The team delivers tools, platforms, metrics, and enablement programs to reduce friction for engineers and improve productivity across GM.

You will focus on measuring engineering effectiveness, shaping golden paths, and guiding AI-enabled developer workflows while mentoring engineers and partnering with security, infra, and

Qualifications

• Proven experience as a Staff Engineer or senior technical leader driving technical strategy and execution across multiple teams.
• Strong systems thinking and product mindset; treat developers as customers and design intuitive, resilient solutions.
• AI-native mindset: experience using and integrating AI/ML into engineering workflows or ability to ramp quickly.
• Track record of technical leadership without formal authority; mentoring others and driving cross-team alignment.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate technical tradeoffs and build trust.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical strategy and delivery for platforms, tools, and workflows that improve developer productivity, quality, and satisfaction across GM.
• Design and implement golden paths for shipping software, covering repo structure, CI/CD, testing, security, observability, and deployment.
• Build automation and self-service capabilities to reduce manual toil (environment provisioning, pipeline setup, guardrails).
• Embed AI into engineering workflows, including agents and copilots for planning, coding, testing, documentation, and operations.
• Partner with product, security, infra, and application teams to translate pain points into platform improvements.
• Mentor engineers across IT, promoting best practices in software engineering and AI-assisted development.
• Define and track metrics (lead time, PR cycle time, change failure rate, developer satisfaction) to guide investments.
• Contribute to engineering standards, patterns, and reference architectures used across GM IT.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

AI/ML integration

Systems thinking

Tools

GitHub/GitLab

CI/CD pipelines

Jira/ADO

Job description

Job Description

The Role

Hybrid: This role is categorized as hybrid. This means the successful candidate is expected to report to Austin TX IT Innovation Center or Warren Michigan GM Technical Center 3 days per week (T-W-Th)

The Role:

This Staff Software Engineer - Developer Experience role sits within the Developer Experience (DevEx) team at the intersection of DevEx, data, and business strategy . The team provides tools, platforms, metrics, and enablement programs that reduce friction for engineers, streamline software delivery workflows, and improve developer satisfaction and productivity across General Motors .

In this role, you will focus on Developer Productivity & Insights -defining how we measure and understand engineering effectiveness, partnering with platform and product teams to synthesize signals across SDLC systems, and translating those insights into clear narratives and recommendations for senior engineering leadership up to the CISO office. Rather than owning a single platform, you will drive change through influence: shaping our metrics strategy, defining and evolving golden paths , evaluating how AI is transforming developer workflows, and turning data into better tools, workflows, and outcomes for engineers.

The DevEx team exists to make life dramatically better for software engineers at GM. As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll help lead the shift from a traditional IT model to an AI-native engineering organization -designing and building automation, golden paths, and AI-driven solutions that remove friction from developer workflows while mentoring and upskilling engineers across IT.

What you’ll do:

• Lead technical strategy and delivery for platforms, tools, and workflows that improve developer productivity, quality, and satisfaction across GM.
• Design and implement golden paths (opinionated, paved-road workflows) for shipping software-covering repo structure, CI/CD, testing, security, observability, and deployment.
• Build automation and self-service capabilities that reduce manual toil (e.g., environment provisioning, pipeline setup, guardrail enforcement, standards checks).
• Embed AI into engineering workflows, including agents and copilots that assist with planning, coding, testing, documentation, and operations.
• Partner with product, security, infra, and application teams to understand pain points and translate them into concrete platform and tooling improvements.
• Act as a multiplier and mentor across the organization, coaching engineers and providing guidance on software engineering, AI-assisted development, and recommended practices.
• Define and track outcome-focused metrics (e.g., lead time for changes, PR cycle time, change failure rate, developer satisfaction) and use data to guide investments.
• Contribute to and influence engineering standards, patterns, and reference architectures used across Core IT and beyond.

What you bring:

• Proven experience as a Staff Engineer or senior technical leader driving technical strategy and execution across multiple teams.
• Strong systems thinking and product mindset-you treat developers as customers and design solutions that are intuitive, resilient, and maintainable.
• AI-native mindset: experience using and integrating AI/ML into engineering workflows (e.g., AI coding assistants, agentic workflows, intelligent automation), or strong evidence you can ramp quickly.
• Track record of technical leadership without formal authority: mentoring others, leading design reviews, influencing roadmaps, and driving cross-team alignment.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate technical tradeoffs and build trust with engineers, managers, and partners.

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in software development.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern language (e.g., Java, Go, C#, Python, TypeScript) and in designing, building, and operating distributed systems in production.
• Deep experience designing and operating modern CI/CD pipelines and release processes, including build, test, deploy, release strategies, rollback, and environment promotion.
• Hands‑on experience with developer platforms and SDLC tooling (e.g., GitHub/GitLab, CI/CD systems, Jira/ADO, artifact repositories, secrets management, feature flags).
• Solid understanding of at least one major cloud platform (Azure/AWS/GCP) and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, etc.).
• Strong understanding of security, compliance, and governance concerns for developer platforms (RBAC, auditability, data boundaries).
• Experience with migration and modernization (on-prem to cloud, legacy to modern pipelines, tool consolidation).

What Will Give You A Competitive Edge (Preferred Qualifications):

• Experience in platform engineering, SRE, or internal developer platforms.
• Background in large, regulated, or safety-critical environments where security, compliance, and reliability are first-class concerns.
• Prior work in Developer Experience / Developer Productivity / DevTools organ