Staff Software Engineer - Build System Modernization

GM • Milford, MI

5d

About The Position

General Motors is seeking a software engineering leader to modernize and scale the build systems that support software-defined vehicles. This role will help lead the transition from a legacy Make-based system to Bazel, Google’s open-source build tool, improving speed, reliability, and robustness across the engineering organization. The successful candidate will drive this capability at scale, influence technical direction across teams, and help establish lofty platform capability goals.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in software engineering or equivalent experience
• 15 years of software development experience
• Deep understanding of real-time software architecture
• Experience shipping high-quality, safety-critical products in automotive, embedded, safety-related, calibration, or systems-engineering environments.
• Exceptional problem-solving and analytical abilities, with keen attention to detail
• Ability to manage multiple projects and priorities in fast-paced, action-oriented decision-making environments.
• Strong expertise building and maintaining production software systems
• Proficiency in Python and at least one additional engineering-tooling language
• Experience with AI-assisted developer productivity, coding agents, code intelligence, knowledge retrieval, or workflow orchestration.
• Bachelor's degree in software engineering or or equivalent experience
• 12+ years of experience in software development
• Deep understanding of software architecture for real time systems
• Experience shipping high-quality safety critical products
• Exceptional problem-solving and analytical abilities, with a keen attention to detail
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects and priorities in a fast-paced environment.
• Demonstrated ability to work in an action-oriented decision-making environment
• Strong expertise building and maintaining production software systems, with proficiency in Python and at least one additional language used in engineering tooling environments
• Automotive, embedded, safety-related, calibration, or systems-engineering environments.
• Large-scale migration from Make or shell-based build orchestration to Bazel.
• AI-assisted developer productivity, coding agents, code intelligence, knowledge retrieval, or workflow orchestration.
• Evaluation of AI-enabled engineering workflows using measurable quality, adoption, and productivity outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead software engineering productivity and effectiveness by identifying opportunities, shaping strategies, improving processes, guiding change, and connecting initiatives to deliver greater value through innovation, learning, and simplification.
• Lead high-impact efforts hands-on, solve complex and unusual problems, and communicate effectively as a coach and mentor while balancing technical command with empathy.
• Modernize a large embedded-software build and test system by transitioning legacy Make- or shell-based workflows to Bazel and establishing scalable, reproducible, secure, and developer-friendly infrastructure across repositories, toolchains, CI/CD, testing, and release processes.
• Assess current build, test, dependency, toolchain, and hardware workflows to define a phased Bazel migration strategy and rollout model.
• Design and implement reusable Bazel rules, macros, toolchains, platforms, configuration patterns, and repository standards, while migrating embedded applications, libraries, generated code, firmware, cross-compilation flows, and platform variants with validated build parity and reproducibility.
• Integrate Bazel with enterprise CI/CD, testing, release, artifact, deployment, observability, security, and infrastructure workflows, and optimize the platform through caching, parallelism, reliability practices, documentation, training, legacy Make retirement, and continuous improvement.
• Measure success through target repositories migrated with validated build and test parity; faster clean and incremental builds, CI queues, and developer feedback; increased reproducibility, approved hermetic-toolchain adoption, cache effectiveness, and CI capacity; and lower build, pipeline, and flaky-test rates.
• Improve diagnosis and recovery time while ensuring complete artifact provenance, test evidence, and security-policy compliance for releases, strong developer adoption, reduced support burden, and measurable productivity improvement.
• Evaluate AI-enabled engineering workflows using measurable quality, adoption, and productivity outcomes.

Benefits

• Company Vehicle Upon successful completion of a motor vehicle report review, you will be eligible to participate in a company vehicle evaluation program, though which you will be assigned a General Motors vehicle to drive and evaluate. Note: program participants are required to purchase/lease a qualifying GM vehicle every four years unless one of a limited number of exceptions applies.
• Bonus Potential An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.
• medical
• dental
• vision
• Health Savings Account
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• retirement savings plan
• sickness and accident benefits
• life insurance
• paid vacation & holidays
• tuition assistance programs
• employee assistance program
• GM vehicle discounts

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior