Principal Software Engineer, Engineering Effectiveness

GM•Milford, MI

13h•Remote

About The Position

General Motors is seeking a highly skilled and experienced professional to join our team as a Principal Software Engineer, Engineering Effectiveness. This role is focused on solving some of the most difficult and high-leverage engineering problems across the software development process. The person in this role will identify areas where human workflows, compute workflows, and engineering systems are operating far below their potential, then design and implement technical solutions that materially improve speed, cost, correctness, and usability. The ideal candidate is highly autonomous, deeply technical, and energized by problems that appear difficult, inefficient, or intractable. They should be comfortable moving between code, systems, data, workflows, and organizational habits to find the real source of inefficiency and unlock outsized improvements. This role will drive change through hands-on implementation, technical leadership, and close collaboration with partner teams.

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