Senior Software Engineer - SRE

Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Role

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

This role emphasizes ownership of specific reliability technologies such as observability, container orchestration, and CI/CD platforms.

• 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

This role requires a blend of software engineering and systems engineering skills.

• 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

This role also values additional expertise in certain areas.

• 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.

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 collectively – to drive meaningful change through our words, our deeds and our culture. Every day, we want every employee to feel they belong to one General Motors team.

Benefits Overview

From day one, we're looking out for your well-being–at work and at home–so you can focus on realizing your ambitions. Learn how GM supports a rewarding career that rewards you personally by visiting Total Rewards resources.

Non-Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunities (U.S.)

General Motors is committed to being a workplace that is not only free of unlawful discrimination, but one that genuinely fosters inclusion and belonging. We strongly believe that providing an inclusive workplace creates an environment in which our employees can thrive and develop better products for our customers. All employment decisions are made on a non-discriminatory basis without regard to sex, race, color, national origin, citizenship status, religion, age, disability, pregnancy or maternity status, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran or protected veteran, or any other similarly protected status in accordance with federal, state and local laws. We encourage interested candidates to review the key responsibilities and qualifications for each role and apply for any positions that match their skills and capabilities. Applicants in the recruitment process may be required, where applicable, to successfully complete a role-related assessment(s) and/or a pre-employment screening prior to beginning employment. To learn more, visit How we Hire.

Accommodations

General Motors offers opportunities to all job seekers including individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation to assist with your job search or application for employment, email us at Careers.Accommodations@GM.com. In your email, please include a description of the specific accommodation you are requesting as well as the job title and requisition number of the position for which you are applying.