Staff Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

GM•Sunnyvale, CA

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

GM Vehicle Autonomy is forming a centralized Site Reliability Engineering team to make reliability a measurable, engineered property of the systems used to build, validate, release, and operate autonomous-vehicle software. As one of our founding SREs, you will have the unique opportunity to take this program from 0 to 1. You will not be an embedded support engineer or a centralized help desk. Instead, you will establish the core governance layer, define pragmatic standards, write production automation, and partner with infrastructure teams to help them operate reliably without depending on heroics. If you are an expert in SRE practices who loves building the machine that builds the machine, this is your chance to shape the reliability culture for the future of autonomous driving.

Requirements

Significant experience as an SRE, Production Engineer, or Infrastructure Software Engineer operating large-scale distributed systems.
Demonstrated experience taking an SRE or operational excellence program from 0 to 1, or materially improving a program in an organization with uneven reliability maturity.
Strong software engineering ability in at least one general-purpose language (Go, Python, Java, C++, etc.).
Deep systems knowledge across several domains: Linux, networking, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, or observability.
Practical, hands-on experience defining SLIs/SLOs, using error budgets, designing actionable alerts, and improving on-call health.
The ability to build consensus and drive adoption of standards across teams without taking away their ownership of the underlying services.
Sound judgment under ambiguity: you can distinguish urgent operational symptoms from the engineering work required to prevent recurrence.

Nice To Haves

Experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, safety-relevant systems, automotive software, or another high-consequence production environment.
Experience with hybrid cloud/on-premises environments and foundational platform services.
Experience with data or ML platforms, including data freshness, distributed training, model artifacts, or model serving.
Experience building service catalogs, production-readiness automation, reliability scorecards, or policy-as-code.
Experience facilitating game days, failure injection, regional failover, or disaster-recovery exercises.

Responsibilities

Co-found the SRE Practice: Translate our reliability charter into working engineering systems, adoption paths, and measurable outcomes.
Build the Paved Road: Design and build shared reliability tooling and automation for service cataloging, SLOs, error budgets, readiness evidence, and toil reduction.
Define the Standards: Establish a risk-based production reliability architecture, minimum standards, golden paths, and a time-bound exception process.
Drive Incident Excellence: Partner with Incident Management to operationalize severity, command, and response standards. Establish blameless post-incident practices and ensure corrective actions are tracked and completed.
Partner with Service Owners: Help teams classify critical services, map dependencies, identify failure modes, and establish meaningful SLIs/SLOs based on developer, vehicle, or operator outcomes.
Protect Engineering Capacity: Decline toil transfer and turn repeated manual operational work into reusable software.