Staff Systems Engineer - Autonomy Behavior

General Motors; Sunnyvale (CA); On-site; USD 189,000 - 291,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Retirement savings plan

Tuition assistance

GM vehicle discounts

Job summary

General Motors is seeking a Staff Autonomy Behavior Systems Engineer to define the technical direction for behavior specification, evaluation, and evidence-based validation. You will collaborate across behavior, software, simulation, safety, legal, product, and operations to build a validation system for sound safety and launch decisions, with continuous operation.

You will connect requirements, scene definitions, metrics, acceptance criteria, coverage, simulation validity, human references, and

Qualifications

• Master's degree in related field; advanced degree is a plus.
• 8+ years in systems engineering, autonomous vehicles, robotics, or safety-critical validation.
• Proven record evaluating autonomous vehicles for commercial fleets or similar decision-making.
• Deep systems engineering fundamentals: architecture, decomposition, requirements strategy, traceability.
• Experience defining large-scale simulation evaluation with trade-offs on coverage, confidence, runtime, and cost.
• Strong Python experience; ability to read/write production-quality analysis code.
• Strong communication and cross-team alignment skills.
• Evidence of leadership across organizational boundaries and establishing reusable validation processes.

Responsibilities

• Set the systems engineering approach for behavior validation from requirements through release and monitoring.
• Lead validation strategy by connecting safety claims, expectations, hazard analysis, requirements, tests, and evidence.
• Set direction for behavior evaluation and simulation at scale across synthetic tests, road data, and counterfactuals.
• Lead cross-functional reviews and guide validation tools, data pipelines, simulation workflows, and analysis products toward repeatable systems.

Skills

Systems engineering

Python programming

Validation

Simulation

Leadership

Stakeholder management

Communication

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Master's degree in engineering or related field

Tools

Python

Job description

Job Description

Role

As a Staff Autonomy Behavior Systems Engineer, you will set the technical direction for how autonomous vehicle behavior is specified, evaluated, and supported by evidence. You will work across behavior, software, simulation, safety, legal, product, and operations to build a validation system that supports sound safety and launch decisions and can run continuously.

You will bring deep experience evaluating autonomous vehicles in commercial fleets and understand the difference between a test that produces a result and a validation system people can trust. You will connect requirements, scene definitions, metrics, acceptance criteria, coverage, simulation validity, human references, and the decision process around the result.

What You’ll Do

• Set the systems engineering approach for behavior validation from product requirements through release and monitoring, including behavior decomposition, metrics, acceptance criteria, coverage, confidence, and traceability.
• Lead validation strategy for major capabilities and cross-cutting behaviors by connecting safety claims, legal and compliance expectations, hazard analysis, requirements, simulation tests, and release evidence.
• Set the direction for behavior evaluation and simulation at scale across synthetic tests, road data, and counterfactual references, including scenario sourcing, sampling, orchestration, data quality, and reproducibility.
• Lead cross-functional technical reviews and guide validation tools, data pipelines, simulation workflows, and analysis products toward repeatable systems; turning complex results into clear recommendations.

Required Qualifications

• Master's degree in systems engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, or a related field. Advanced degree is a plus.
• 8 or more years of professional experience in systems engineering, autonomous vehicles, robotics, vehicle development, simulation, or safety-critical validation.
• A proven record of evaluating autonomous vehicles for a commercial fleet, launch, supervised release, or other high-consequence product decision.
• Deep systems engineering fundamentals, including architecture and decomposition, use-case and scene modeling, requirements strategy, interface definition, verification and validation planning, and traceability.
• Professional experience defining or leading simulation evaluation at scale, including the trade-offs between coverage, confidence, runtime, cost, and simulation validity.
• Strong Python experience. You should be comfortable reading and writing production-quality analysis or validation software, reviewing designs and pull requests, and using code to test an engineering idea quickly.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to create alignment among teams with different goals, terminology, and technical perspectives.
• Demonstrated stakeholder management and technical leadership across organizational boundaries. You have led work through influence, not only through formal authority.
• Evidence of setting direction beyond a single project, such as establishing a methodology, framework, lifecycle, platform, standard, or reusable validation process adopted by other engineers or teams.

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge

• Human benchmarking for behavior and safety evaluation, including attentive human benchmark construction, human percentile methods, expert review, and the limits of human references.
• Counterfactual analysis in simulation, including AV versus human or AV versus alternate-policy comparisons under matched scene conditions.
• Experience building or using a safety case, writing or reviewing safety claims, and determining what validation evidence is needed to support those claims.
• Strong familiarity with hazard analysis and structured safety methods such as STPA, FMEA, fault trees, scenario-based hazard analysis, or equivalent approaches.
• Experience with risk quantification, risk acceptance, severity and exposure reasoning, risk budgets, and mitigation decisions.
• Experience turning legal or regulatory expectations into a defensible compliance strategy with requirements, metrics, test coverage, and documented claims.
• Experience designing validation lifecycles that connect scope definition, requirements, hazard analysis, coverage planning, test generation, scorecards, release decisions, and continuous monitoring.
• Experience building or guiding validation scorecards, confidence rubrics, behavior protocols, or similar products used by multiple engineering teams.
• Experience reducing manual expert review through well-designed automation while preserving expert judgment where it matters.
• A track record of developing other engineers, leading technical communities, and making a broader organization better at systems engineering and validation.

Compensation:

• The salary range for this role: is $189,300 to $290,700. 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

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