Staff Platform Engineer, Cloud Platform

General Motors•Austin, TX

5d•$160,200 - $333,400•Hybrid

About The Position

This is a hands-on Staff-level engineering role spanning GM’s internal cloud platform, its underlying foundations, the developer-facing control plane, and the runtime that keeps workloads healthy. The goal is to make building and running software on GM’s cloud as easy and reliable as possible. The engineer will write production code, set technical direction, and raise engineering standards across teams. The role focuses on building a platform engineers choose to use, replacing ticket-driven provisioning with declarative API-driven infrastructure, and designing APIs, CLI tools, and MCP tools for engineers and AI agents. It also includes improving reliability and scale through cell-based and multi-region architecture, partnering with SRE on meaningful SLOs, and making delivery from merge to production fast and safe through built-in promotion, rollback, and policy. The position is categorized as hybrid. The selected candidate is expected to report to a specific location at least three times a week, or at another frequency determined by their manager. 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.
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.
Solid grounding in cloud networking, identity, and security; Azure experience is preferred.
Track record of improving reliability with SLOs, observability, and blameless incident practice.
Strong product sense for developer experience, including attention to CLI output, error messages, and documentation.
Good judgment in simplifying systems, including willingness to remove systems rather than add more.
Clear written communication and ability to persuade skeptical audiences through 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 major sources of developer toil and platform instability using code and automation.
Build golden paths that make the preferred way to ship software at GM the easiest way.
Use AI tooling such as Cursor, Claude Code, and agents, and help make the platform usable by agents through APIs and MCP.
Partner with SRE on reliability, on-call, and incident reviews, and hold the platform to 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 a default platform path for shipping software and move existing workloads onto it without downtime.
Replace hand-built and ticket-driven provisioning with declarative, API-driven infrastructure for networking, identity, and accounts.
Design simple, consistent APIs, CLI tools, and MCP tools for engineers and AI agents.
Design for availability and scale, including cell-based and multi-region architecture.
Improve delivery from merge to production through promotion, rollback, and policy capabilities.

Benefits

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