Senior Software Engineer - SRE

Site Reliability Engineer

The rapid adoption of advanced software in vehicles marks a new era for automakers and consumers, bringing both advantages and challenges.

As part of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at General Motors, you'll join a dedicated team focused on enhancing the reliability, efficiency, and scalability of our distributed systems. We leverage engineering principles to manage operations effectively and build solutions that enable us to grow without sacrificing performance or quality. Our SREs work closely with software development teams, acting as specialists in reliability and production engineering, with a focus on automation, observability, and shared responsibility. This includes building and maintaining our observability stack to ensure robust telemetry and actionable insights.

We are looking for individuals who are passionate about maintaining the health of our infrastructure while optimizing for reliability and cost-efficiency. This role involves a blend of software engineering and systems engineering skills to keep our services resilient, robust, and scalable.

This role is for a hands-on position as an Individual Contributor (IC). As an SRE IC, you will focus on enhancing the reliability, efficiency, and performance of our services. You'll work closely with other engineers to develop automated solutions, respond to incidents, and drive improvements across our infrastructure. The expectation for this role is that you will maintain a hands-on approach, whether it's through scripting, troubleshooting incidents, or improving observability. As an IC, you will be at the forefront of solving technical challenges and making impactful improvements that directly enhance the quality of service for our users. The role requires a blend of software engineering and systems engineering skills to address complex production challenges effectively. This includes building and maintaining our observability stack to ensure robust telemetry and actionable insights.

Key Responsibilities:

• Automation and Reliability Improvements: Develop tools and software to automate operational processes, improve system reliability, and reduce manual intervention.
• Observability and Monitoring: Lead, implement and improve monitoring and observability frameworks, enabling proactive detection and resolution of incidents. This includes building and maintaining our observability stack to ensure robust telemetry and actionable insights.
• Incident Response: Participate in an on-call rotation to diagnose, troubleshoot, and mitigate production incidents, ensuring minimal downtime and swift resolution.
• Collaboration with Development Teams: Work alongside developers to ensure the quality, scalability, and reliability of our services. Practice shared ownership of services in production, fostering a "You build it, you run it" culture.
• Service Level Management: Manage Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to manage reliability expectations effectively.
• Engineering for Reliability: Strong understanding of common application reliability patterns, with hands-on experience implementing them.
• Failure Analysis and Post-Incident Reviews: Conduct deep-dive analyses of incidents and collaborate on post-incident reviews to derive learnings and prevent recurrence. Champion a culture of continuous improvement.
• Cost Efficiency: Evaluate system performance and advocate for optimizations that reduce infrastructure costs while maintaining service reliability.

Skills and Qualifications:

• Programming Skills: Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Java) and familiarity with multiple language ecosystems.
• Systems Knowledge: Solid understanding of operating systems, networking, distributed systems, databases, and storage architectures.
• Strong Understanding of System Fundamentals: Deep understanding of how code runs on underlying hardware, including operating systems, algorithms, and data structures. Ability to optimize or troubleshoot code by understanding its execution and the impact on system resources.
• Incident Management: Experience handling production incidents, including root cause analysis, mitigation, and working through complex system failures.
• Communication and Collaboration: Strong communication skills, with an ability to explain technical concepts to both engineering and business stakeholders. Commitment to collaborative problem-solving and shared ownership of services.
• Automation Focus: Proven experience in automating manual processes, building deployment pipelines, or managing configuration systems.

Preferred Experience:

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Familiarity with container orchestration systems like Kubernetes. You will also be responsible for developing and supporting our container orchestration platform, ensuring it meets scalability and reliability needs.
• A track record of managing or developing distributed systems.
• Prior experience with Java in production.

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 $128,400 to $269,100. 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.