Staff Software Engineer – Core OS, Vehicle Compute

General Motors•Mountain View, CA

6d•$160,200 - $330,400•Hybrid

About The Position

The Core OS group is a newly formed team standing up the operating-system foundation GM's software-defined vehicles run on: the virtualization and platform-services layer that lets embedded Linux, Android, and QNX share vehicle compute safely and efficiently. As one of the founding engineers, you'll set technical direction from a blank sheet across hypervisor integration, guest OS enablement, resource partitioning, the boot and secure-boot chain, container runtime, and the health and fault-management services that keep the platform reliable in production. The architecture you choose now becomes the platform every GM vehicle software team builds on, and getting it right means debugging across boundaries most engineers never cross — guest to host, software to silicon, between partitions with different safety requirements.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field; or equivalent practical experience.
Ten or more years of professional experience in embedded, systems, or kernel-level software development, including production software in automotive or similarly complex embedded domains.
Deep expertise in operating-system-level software on Arm-based system-on-chips (SoCs), with experience in several of the following areas: Hypervisor integration, virtual machine configuration, and device virtualization
Real-time operating systems and deterministic scheduling
Linux kernel subsystems, kernel configuration, and low-level system behavior
Bootloaders, secure boot, and platform startup sequencing
Experience delivering commercial embedded systems using Yocto or comparable embedded build systems.
Strong experience with system performance, optimization, and complex debugging, including root-cause analysis across hardware, firmware, hypervisors, kernels, and user space.
Experience with build systems and development tools, including Git, GitHub, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and release-quality engineering for platform software.
Strong proficiency in C and C++, plus practical experience with Python and shell scripting for automation, tooling, and debugging.
Demonstrated technical leadership through architecture contributions, mentoring, design reviews, code reviews, and cross-team execution.
Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence technical decisions and explain complex system-level topics clearly.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
Hands-on experience with hypervisors such as Gunyah, QNX Hypervisor, Xen, or KVM/Arm, including virtio device model development.
Experience with QNX Software Development Platform (SDP), Android Open Source Project (AOSP), Android Automotive, or Yocto as guest environments on virtualized platforms.
Experience with automotive functional safety, including ISO 26262, Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL), freedom from interference, safety islands, or health-monitoring frameworks.
Experience with automotive cybersecurity, including ISO/SAE 21434.
Experience with container runtimes such as Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant runtimes, Podman, or systemd-based isolation in resource-constrained environments.
Familiarity with trusted execution environments, secure-boot chains, and key management on embedded platforms.
Experience with Rust in systems or safety-relevant contexts.
Strong command-line experience in Linux or UNIX environments, including tools such as GDB, perf, ftrace, strace, and hypervisor-level tracing.
Contributions to open-source virtualization or operating-system projects.

Responsibilities

Own critical hypervisor and virtual machine capabilities, including virtual machine definitions, CPU and memory partitioning, device assignment and passthrough, and virtio-based device models.
Design and optimize communication between virtual machines using shared memory, message passing, and virtualized input/output for throughput, latency, and deterministic behavior.
Enable and maintain guest operating systems across embedded Linux, including Yocto-based distributions, Android, and QNX, with consistent access to platform services, time synchronization, lifecycle control, interfaces, and developer tooling.
Implement and optimize the boot and secure-boot chain across partitions, including startup sequencing, boot-time performance, and platform-integrity verification.
Build platform services for resource governance, health monitoring, watchdogs, fault detection, fault handling, and recovery, while meeting automotive safety and availability requirements.
Develop container-runtime and workload-management capabilities for in-vehicle applications, including isolation, resource limits, lifecycle management, updates, and rollbacks.
Profile, optimize, and debug CPU, memory, input/output, and interrupt behavior across the virtualized stack. Lead root-cause analysis using traces, logs, and low-level tools to resolve issues spanning guest operating systems, hypervisors, firmware, and silicon.
Improve engineering quality through continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), bench and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) automation, validation strategies, Git and GitHub workflows, and code reviews.
Mentor engineers and collaborate with silicon enablement, guest operating system, board support package (BSP), functional safety, and cybersecurity teams.