Staff Software Engineer

General Motors • Austin, TX

1d • Hybrid

About The Position

This role is based remotely but if you live within a 50-mile radius of [Austin, Detroit, Milford or Mountain View], you are expected to report to that location three times a week, at minimum. The Role We are looking for a Staff Software Developer to lead the design and implementation of our in-vehicle data plane, control plane, and embedded logging infrastructure. You will architect and build ‑high throughput, ‑low latency pipelines that reliably move telemetry, commands, and logs between ‑resource constrained‑ ECUs, vehicle platforms (QNX, Android, Linux), and cloud services. The ideal candidate is a hands-on‑ staff engineer with deep experience in C/C++, strong systems and networking fundamentals, and a track record of scaling data intensive‑ or observability platforms in production. Where You May Focus Depending on background and interest, you may be primarily aligned to one of the following areas while collaborating closely across all three: Data Plane – High-volume‑, binary and telemetry pipelines, edge aggregation, reliable delivery and back‑pressure across heterogeneous networks and controllers. Control Plane – Configuration, command, and policy APIs for vehicle services; orchestration of data and logging behavior; safe remote operations. Embedded Logging & Observability – Logging/metrics/traces libraries and agents on ECUs; on device‑ buffering, filtering, sampling, and export to back‑end systems.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 8+ years of hands-on‑ development experience in C/C++ building production systems; strong skills in memory management, concurrency, and performance optimization.
• Experience building data intensive, streaming, or logging/observability pipelines (‑on device, ‑on prem‑, or cloud).
• Embedded OS experience with one or more of: QNX, Linux, Android/Android Automotive, or similar RTOS class‑ platforms.
• Solid understanding of logging and data processing principles: structured logging, sampling, batching, buffering, compression, on device‑ storage, and failure handling.
• Expert understanding of vehicle communication protocols, including UDS, CAN, SOME/IP, XCP, and how they are used for diagnostics, configuration, and control.
• Solid understanding of AUTOSAR (Classic and/or Adaptive) concepts and how they constrain software and communication patterns.
• Demonstrated experience leading complex cross organizational‑ initiatives and influencing technical direction beyond your immediate team.
• Proven track record as an expert software engineer who can take features from concept through design, implementation, test, and production rollout.
• Strong debugging and problem solving‑ skills across process boundaries, networks, and hardware/software interactions.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with engineers, architects, and stakeholders across domains.
• Experience shipping and operating software in production environments, ideally with safety or ‑mission critical‑ aspects.

Nice To Haves

• Hands on experience with observability and ‑dataplane‑ technologies such as Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry/OTLP, MQTT, gRPC, custom collectors/exporters, or similar.
• Understanding of network communication and security protocols, including TLS/mTLS, certificate and key management, authentication/authorization, and secure transport patterns in constrained environments.
• Familiarity with major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their logging, metrics, and data streaming services.
• Experience designing and operating control planes (configuration management, feature flags, rate limiting‑, rollout strategies) for distributed or embedded systems.
• Experience building observability for embedded or edge systems, including on device metrics/logs/traces, remote configuration, and ‑fleet level‑ analysis.
• Contributions to open‑source projects in observability, networking, embedded systems, or data infrastructure.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools (e.g., Git/Gerrit, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions) for embedded or cross compiled‑ software.
• Background in software defined‑ vehicle (SDV) platforms or complex automotive architectures is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and evolve in-vehicle‑ data, control, and logging pipelines spanning various controllers and cloud endpoints.
• Optimize embedded data and logging infrastructure for high throughput, low latency, and predictable resource usage (CPU, RAM, flash, network).
• Develop and own reusable libraries/SDKs and plugins (e.g., collectors, filters, exporters) that teams use to integrate with the data and logging planes.
• Integrate vehicle infrastructure with backend data sinks (e.g., Azure, GCP, S3 or equivalent object/streaming stores), ensuring reliability, security, and cost effective‑ data flows.
• Define and implement control plane‑ APIs and protocols for configuration, data routing, logging policies, and remote operations, with strong safety and security boundaries.
• Collaborate with platform, security, DevOps, and analytics teams to design end-to-end‑ observability and data flows from device to cloud.
• Profile, monitor, and troubleshoot embedded software to drive systemic improvements in performance, reliability, and debuggability.
• Lead technical design and code reviews, mentor other engineers, and drive cross organizational‑ initiatives around data and observability standards.
• Contribute to or leverage key open‑source technologies (e.g., Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry, MQTT, gRPC, protocol/tooling around observability and data pipelines) through issue reporting, design discussions, documentation, or patches as appropriate.

Benefits

• GM offers a variety of health and wellbeing benefit programs. Benefit options include 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 and more.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees