Principal Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

Position Overview

At General Motors, as part of our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, you will play a crucial role in enhancing the reliability, efficiency, and scalability of our distributed systems. In this hands-on role as a Software Engineer, SRE IC, you will develop automated solutions, participate in incident response, and collaborate closely with development teams. Your work will ensure robust, resilient services while balancing cost-efficiency and performance.

Key Responsibilities

• Automation and Reliability Improvements: Develop tools and software to automate operational processes, improve system reliability, and reduce manual intervention.
• Observability and Monitoring: Implement and enhance monitoring and observability frameworks for proactive incident detection and resolution.
• Incident Response: Participate in an on-call rotation to diagnose, troubleshoot, and mitigate production incidents, ensuring minimal downtime.
• Collaboration with Development Teams: Work closely with developers to ensure service quality, scalability, and reliability, fostering a "You build it, you run it" culture.
• Service Level Management: Manage SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs to set and maintain reliability expectations.
• Engineering for Reliability: Apply best practices and common reliability patterns to production systems.
• Failure Analysis and Post-Incident Reviews: Conduct deep-dive analyses and collaborate on reviews to drive continuous improvement.
• Cost Efficiency: Evaluate system performance and recommend optimizations to reduce infrastructure costs while maintaining high reliability.

Required Qualifications

• Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Java) with familiarity across multiple ecosystems.
• Solid understanding of operating systems, networking, distributed systems, databases, and storage architectures.
• Deep understanding of system fundamentals, including operating systems, algorithms, and data structures.
• Experience handling production incidents, including root cause analysis and mitigation of complex system failures.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical concepts to both technical and business stakeholders.
• Proven experience in automating manual processes, building deployment pipelines, or managing configuration systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Familiarity with container orchestration systems such as Kubernetes.
• A track record of managing or developing distributed systems.
• Prior experience with Java in production environments.
• 8+ years of industry experience.
• Additional academic qualifications in computer science or related fields are a plus.

Benefits & Perks

• Compensation: Base compensation is $225,000 - $344,800, varying based on factors relevant to the position.
• Bonus Potential: Incentive pay program offering payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual contribution.
• Benefits: GM provides a broad range of health and wellbeing programs including medical, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Accounts, retirement savings plan, life insurance, paid vacations & holidays, tuition assistance, and GM vehicle discounts.
• Relocation benefits may be available.