Staff Platform Engineer, Cloud Platform

GM•Seattle, WA

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

This is a Staff-level, hands-on engineering role spanning GM’s internal cloud platform, its underlying foundations, developer-facing control plane, and workload runtime. The role aims to make building and running software on GM’s cloud as easy and reliable as leading developer platforms. The engineer will write production code, set technical direction, and raise engineering standards across teams. The role focuses on building the default path for shipping software at GM; moving workloads to the platform without downtime; replacing ticket-driven provisioning with declarative, API-driven infrastructure; and designing APIs, CLI, and MCP tools for engineers and AI agents. It also includes designing for availability and scale, partnering with SRE on meaningful SLOs, and making delivery from code merge to production fast and safe through built-in promotion, rollback, and policy. The successful candidate will design and build platform capabilities end to end, lead technical direction and design documentation for platform areas, eliminate developer toil and instability through code and automation, and create easy-to-use golden paths. They will use AI tools as part of their engineering workflow, collaborate with SRE on reliability and incident practices, mentor senior engineers, review designs and code across teams, and work directly with application teams to improve the platform experience. The position is categorized as hybrid. The selected candidate is expected to report to a specific location at least three times per week, or at another frequency set by their manager. GM does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role, including sponsorship or other immigration support now or in the future.

Requirements

Eight or more years building and operating production infrastructure or platforms.
Several years in a senior or staff role with technical leadership across teams.
Deep, hands-on experience operating 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 running 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.
Strong grounding in cloud networking, identity, and security; Azure experience is preferred.
Track record of improving reliability with SLOs, observability, and blameless incident practices.
Strong product sense for developer experience, including attention to CLI output, error messages, and documentation.
Good judgment and ability to simplify systems, including willingness to remove systems rather than add more.
Clear written communication and ability to bring skeptical stakeholders along with a strong design.

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 developer toil and platform instability through code and automation.
Build golden paths that make the preferred way to ship software at GM the easiest way.
Use AI tooling, including Cursor, Claude Code, and agents, as a normal part of development.
Help make the platform usable by AI 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 obstacles.
Build the default software delivery platform at GM and improve it based on what slows teams down.
Move existing workloads onto the platform without downtime.
Replace hand-built and ticket-driven infrastructure provisioning with declarative, API-driven provisioning for networking, identity, and accounts.
Design simple, consistent APIs, CLI, and MCP tools for engineers and AI agents.
Design for availability and scale, including cell-based and multi-region architectures.
Improve delivery from merge to production with promotion, rollback, and policy built in.

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.
Health and wellbeing benefit programs.