Staff Platform Engineer, Cloud Platform

GM•Warren, MI

4d•$160,200 - $333,400•Hybrid

About The Position

General Motors is hiring a Staff-level, hands-on engineer to improve its internal cloud platform and make building and running software on GM’s cloud a fast, reliable, and straightforward experience. The role spans the platform foundations, developer-facing control plane, and workload runtime. The engineer will build production code, set technical direction, and raise engineering standards across teams. The work includes building an easy-to-adopt default path for shipping software, moving existing workloads to the platform without downtime, and replacing manual, ticket-driven infrastructure provisioning with declarative, API-driven services for networking, identity, and accounts. The engineer will design APIs, CLI tools, and MCP interfaces for engineers and AI agents; improve availability and scale through architectures such as cell-based and multi-region designs; and make delivery from code merge to production fast and safe through promotion, rollback, and policy capabilities. The position partners with SRE and application teams to improve reliability, define and meet measurable SLOs, reduce developer toil, and address platform friction. It also includes technical leadership through design documents, mentorship, cross-team design and code reviews, and direct contributions to platform implementation and operations. GM categorizes the role as hybrid, with the selected candidate expected to report to a specific location at least three times per week or at another frequency set by their manager. The stated salary range is $160,200–$333,400, with incentive pay potential. GM does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role.

Requirements

At least 10 years building and operating production infrastructure or platforms, including several years in a senior or staff role with technical leadership across teams.
Deep, hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production at scale, including cluster operations, multi-tenancy, autoscaling, and upgrades.
Strong software engineering skills in Go or a comparable language, with experience writing production code rather than only configuration.
Experience designing and operating an internal developer platform, PaaS, or cloud control plane used by other engineers.
Expertise with infrastructure as code and declarative provisioning, such as Terraform, Crossplane, or Kubernetes operators and controllers.
Solid grounding in cloud networking, identity, and security; Azure is preferred.
Track record of improving reliability with SLOs, observability, and blameless incident practices.
Strong product sense for developer experience, including CLI output, error messages, and documentation.
Ability and judgment to simplify systems, including preferring to remove a system rather than add another.
Clear written communication and ability to gain support for designs in a skeptical audience.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Istio or another service mesh, Gateway API, ArgoCD, Kargo, KEDA, Karpenter, or Kyverno.
Experience building or migrating a large platform with zero downtime for tenants.
Experience with event streaming platforms such as Azure Event Hubs or Kafka.
Experience with cell-based or multi-region architectures.
Experience building MCP servers or other interfaces designed for AI agents.
Experience with cloud cost optimization and FinOps data pipelines.
Contributions to open source projects in the cloud native ecosystem.

Responsibilities

Design and build core platform capabilities end to end, from API design through production operations.
Set technical direction for one or more platform areas and write design documents for the team.
Identify and eliminate sources of developer toil and platform instability through code and automation.
Build golden paths that make the preferred way to ship software the easiest way.
Use AI tooling, including Cursor, Claude Code, and agents, and help make the platform usable by agents through APIs and MCP.
Partner with SRE on reliability, on-call, incident reviews, and measurable SLOs.
Mentor senior engineers, review designs and code across teams, and model engineering standards.
Work directly with application teams to understand and resolve platform friction.
Build the default software delivery path at GM and improve it based on team feedback.
Move existing workloads to the platform without downtime.
Replace manual, ticket-driven provisioning with declarative, API-driven infrastructure for networking, identity, and accounts.
Design APIs, CLI tools, and MCP tools for engineers and AI agents.
Design for availability and scale, including cell-based and multi-region architecture.
Improve the path from merge to production with promotion, rollback, and policy built in.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision benefits.
Health Savings Account and 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.
Other health and wellbeing benefit programs.
Incentive pay program with payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.