Staff Software Engineer – Developer Experience

General Motors • Austin, TX

3d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Staff Software Engineer – Developer Experience role is part of General Motors’ Developer Experience (DevEx) team, working at the intersection of developer experience, data, and business strategy. The team provides tools, platforms, metrics, and enablement programs to reduce friction for engineers, streamline software delivery, and improve developer satisfaction and productivity across GM.

The role focuses on Developer Productivity & Insights: defining how engineering effectiveness is measured, synthesizing signals across software development lifecycle systems with platform and product teams, and presenting insights and recommendations to senior engineering leadership, including the CISO office. The successful candidate will shape metrics strategy, define and evolve golden paths, assess AI’s impact on developer workflows, and use data to improve tools, workflows, and engineering outcomes. This role drives change through influence rather than ownership of a single platform.

As part of the effort to move GM from a traditional IT model toward an AI-native engineering organization, the Staff Software Engineer will design and build automation, golden paths, and AI-driven solutions that remove workflow friction, while mentoring and upskilling engineers across IT.

This is a hybrid role. The successful candidate is expected to report three days per week (Tuesday through Thursday) to either the Austin, Texas IT Innovation Center or the Warren, Michigan GM Technical Center.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of experience in software development.
• Proven experience as a Staff Engineer or senior technical leader driving technical strategy and execution across multiple teams.
• Strong systems thinking and product mindset, treating developers as customers and designing intuitive, resilient, and maintainable solutions.
• Experience using and integrating AI/ML into engineering workflows, such as AI coding assistants, agentic workflows, or intelligent automation, or strong evidence of being able to ramp up quickly.
• Track record of technical leadership without formal authority, including mentoring, leading design reviews, influencing roadmaps, and driving cross-team alignment.
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to explain technical tradeoffs and build trust with engineers, managers, and partners.
• Strong proficiency in at least one modern programming language, such as Java, Go, C#, Python, or TypeScript.
• Experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems in production.
• Deep experience designing and operating modern CI/CD pipelines and release processes, including build, test, deploy, release strategies, rollback, and environment promotion.
• Hands-on experience with developer platforms and SDLC tooling, such as GitHub/GitLab, CI/CD systems, Jira/ADO, artifact repositories, secrets management, and feature flags.
• Solid understanding of at least one major cloud platform (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and infrastructure as code, such as Terraform, Bicep, or CloudFormation.
• Strong understanding of security, compliance, and governance concerns for developer platforms, including RBAC, auditability, and data boundaries.
• Experience with migration and modernization, such as on-premises to cloud, legacy to modern pipelines, or tool consolidation.
• GM does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role; applicants who need GM sponsorship now or in the future should not apply.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in platform engineering, SRE, or internal developer platforms.
• Background in large, regulated, or safety-critical environments where security, compliance, and reliability are first-class concerns.
• Prior work in Developer Experience, Developer Productivity, or DevTools organizations.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical strategy and delivery for platforms, tools, and workflows that improve developer productivity, quality, and satisfaction across GM.
• Design and implement golden paths for software delivery, including repository structure, CI/CD, testing, security, observability, and deployment.
• Build automation and self-service capabilities to reduce manual work, such as environment provisioning, pipeline setup, guardrail enforcement, and standards checks.
• Embed AI into engineering workflows, including agents and copilots for planning, coding, testing, documentation, and operations.
• Partner with product, security, infrastructure, and application teams to understand pain points and translate them into platform and tooling improvements.
• Mentor and coach engineers across the organization in software engineering, AI-assisted development, and recommended practices.
• Define and track outcome-focused metrics, such as lead time for changes, pull request cycle time, change failure rate, and developer satisfaction, and use the data to guide investments.
• Contribute to and influence engineering standards, patterns, and reference architectures used across Core IT and beyond.
• Synthesize signals across SDLC systems and communicate insights and recommendations to senior engineering leadership, including the CISO office.
• Shape the developer productivity metrics strategy, evolve golden paths, and evaluate how AI is transforming developer workflows.

Benefits

• GM describes well-being support at work and at home and refers candidates to its Total Rewards resources for details; specific benefits are not listed in the posting.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed