Principal Software Engineer, Engineering Effectiveness

General Motors•Austin, TX

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

General Motors is seeking a highly skilled and experienced professional to join their team as a Principal Software Engineer, Engineering Effectiveness. This role focuses on solving difficult and high-leverage engineering problems across the software development process. The individual will identify areas where human workflows, compute workflows, and engineering systems are underperforming, then design and implement technical solutions to improve speed, cost, correctness, and usability. The ideal candidate is autonomous, deeply technical, and motivated by challenging problems. They should be adept at navigating code, systems, data, workflows, and organizational habits to pinpoint inefficiencies and drive significant improvements. This role involves hands-on implementation, technical leadership, and collaboration with partner teams to effect change.

Requirements

10+ years of professional software engineering experience
Demonstrated ability to solve unusually difficult technical problems with limited oversight and high ambiguity
Strong track record of delivering high-leverage technical improvements across software, automation, platforms, or engineering workflows
Excellent systems thinking and analytical skills, with the ability to find non-obvious sources of inefficiency and address root causes at scale
Deep hands-on engineering capability, including the ability to move from investigation to implementation in complex environments
Passion for correctness, usability, efficiency, and creating systems that make good engineering outcomes easier to achieve

Nice To Haves

Experience optimizing large-scale build, test, CI/CD, release, or other compute-intensive engineering workflows
Experience identifying broad technical patterns across a large codebase and translating those findings into durable improvements
Experience designing or building internal platforms, workflow tooling, dashboards, or self-service engineering systems
Experience improving adoption of better engineering practices across multiple teams through technical leadership and education
Strong instincts for finding high-leverage opportunities where a different technical approach can unlock disproportionate gains

Responsibilities

Identify and solve high-complexity engineering problems with the potential for outsized improvements in speed, efficiency, cost, or developer effectiveness
Build and apply technical solutions that optimize compute-heavy and workflow-heavy parts of the software-development process
Analyze systems and behavioral patterns across teams and codebases to find root causes of waste, friction, duplication, or poor performance
Implement scalable improvements that can be applied broadly rather than solving the same problem repeatedly in isolated ways
Partner with teams to improve both technical systems and the engineering practices that surround them
Teach and enable engineers so that better patterns are understood, adopted, and sustained over time