Senior Engineering Manager, Autonomy Evaluation Applications
About The Position
The Senior Manager of Eval Applications leads four teams—Driver Performance, Subsystem Evaluation, Scenario Classification, and Test Insights—through their managers and tech leads. The role owns the roadmap, execution, and staffing for measuring driving quality and turning evaluation results into decisions that support GM’s autonomous-vehicle program, software releases, and product milestones. The manager ensures partner teams understand and trust evaluation metrics and classifiers, and act on findings from road and simulation testing. The position works with principal and staff engineers who lead evaluation methodology, and with Software Validation and Safety teams that use evaluation results in test strategy and release decisions. It is responsible for building a strong organization, maintaining high technical standards, and translating evaluation results into clear recommendations for engineering and executive leadership. The role is categorized as remote/hybrid: employees based remotely who live within 50 miles of Austin, Detroit, Warren, Milford, or Sunnyvale are expected to report to that location at least three times per week. Following a successful motor vehicle report review, the employee may be eligible to participate in GM’s company vehicle evaluation program, subject to its vehicle requirements.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in autonomous systems, robotics, ML evaluation, applied data science, or large-scale data platforms, with a record of turning analysis into decisions and shipped improvements.
- 5+ years of people leadership, including leading managers or tech leads across multiple teams.
- Track record of hiring and developing strong managers and engineers, and building teams that perform well as priorities shift.
- Experience owning the strategy, roadmap, and execution of a distinct technical area, with measurable outcomes for cross-functional customers.
- Hands-on depth evaluating ML or autonomy systems, including metric design, classifier precision and recall, sampling, experimental design, and statistical confidence; ability to assess whether an analysis supports its conclusions.
- Strong stakeholder engagement and ability to build trusted relationships with partner teams and leadership and maintain alignment through changing priorities and disagreement.
- Production Python and SQL experience in team environments, and comfort reviewing designs and code.
- Record of influencing organizational priorities without direct authority using trusted data.
- Ability to turn ambiguous questions and uncertain results into clear plans and recommendations for executive, engineering, and cross-functional audiences.
- Bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Mechanical or Aerospace Engineering, Machine Learning, Statistics, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice To Haves
- Experience in autonomous driving or field robotics, including driving-log analysis and results from simulation and on-road testing.
- Experience leading teams that produced evaluation evidence for validation and release decisions, ideally for driver-assistance or automated-driving products.
- Experience evaluating at least one autonomy subsystem—perception, prediction, planning, or localization—and relating it to overall driving behavior.
- Experience applying VLMs or LLMs to event classification, triage, or scenario discovery.
- Experience leading mixed teams of software engineers and data scientists.
- Strong data-visualization instincts and ability to present high-dimensional metrics clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
Responsibilities
- Own the Eval Applications strategy, roadmap, and quarterly plans, aligned with AV program milestones and release needs; determine priorities and what teams should build or stop.
- Ensure partner teams in Autonomy, Simulation, Systems, Safety, and Software Validation understand evaluation metrics and scene classifiers, including their meaning, accuracy, and appropriate use.
- Manage the process from observed driving behavior to ranked problems and fixes, ensuring issues from road and simulation testing are sized, routed to responsible teams, and tracked to closure.
- Ensure teams can quickly and reliably assess whether software or model changes improve driving, including regression detection for release reviews.
- Set and track organization-level measures of evaluation quality and impact, such as classifier precision and recall, time to produce a trusted answer, and the influence of findings on decisions.
- Maintain high technical standards through design reviews, code review standards, testing, and statistically sound analysis; collaborate with principal and staff engineers on technical direction.
- Introduce valuable methods, including VLM- and LLM-based classification and triage with human review, and AI-assisted development.
- Communicate clear recommendations to engineering and executive leadership, including what changed, confidence in the results, and recommended next steps.
- Hire, develop, and retain managers, tech leads, engineers, and data scientists, and develop future leaders.
- Lead through managers and tech leads with clear ownership, operating rhythms, and accountability; conduct fair and direct performance management.
- Adjust team structure and staffing as priorities change, balancing immediate program needs with longer-term investments in methods and tooling.
- Resolve cross-team conflicts involving priorities, ownership, or contradictory results, and align stakeholders on next steps.
- Work with Autonomy Evaluation and AV leadership on long-term evaluation strategy and decisions affecting release confidence.
Benefits
- Medical, dental, and vision benefit options
- Health Savings Account
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Retirement savings plan
- Sickness and accident benefits
- Life insurance
- Paid vacation and holidays
- Tuition assistance programs
- Employee assistance program
- GM vehicle discounts
- Incentive pay program with payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance
- Potential eligibility for a company vehicle evaluation program, subject to motor vehicle report review and program requirements
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
