Staff Systems Engineer (Core Platform)

General Motors•Austin, TX

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Physical and Virtual Tests Platform organisation at GM is building a cloud-native platform that transforms physical automotive test hardware into cloud-native compute resources. This platform enables developers to discover, provision, and execute workloads on automotive benches with the same ease as cloud computing. As a Staff Systems Engineer, you will be the bridge between the platform and the hardware it manages -- building integration tooling, hardware discovery services, provisioning workflows, and agent software in Go that connects diverse automotive test equipment to the platform's control plane. This is not a pure embedded development role. You will use your understanding of embedded systems, hardware interfaces, and low-level protocols to inform the design of platform services and tooling that abstract hardware complexity for hundreds of developers. You will work closely with both embedded engineering teams and platform engineers, translating between their worlds and shaping the features that make the platform genuinely useful for teams working with physical hardware. This is a hands-on technical leadership role on a small, greenfield team where your decisions will directly shape how the platform interacts with automotive hardware at scale. If you are excited about turning deep systems knowledge into platform services and developer tooling that transforms how engineers access and use test infrastructure, this role offers the opportunity to define that layer from scratch.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field, or equivalent work experience.
8+ years of software engineering experience with a strong foundation in systems-level programming and infrastructure development.
Strong proficiency in Go, with the ability to write clean, maintainable production code for backend services and systems tooling.
Solid understanding of Linux systems including system interfaces, process management, networking, and service management (systemd).
Experience building integration tooling, agent services, or automation frameworks that bridge hardware and software systems.
Familiarity with embedded systems concepts including firmware management, boot processes, hardware interfaces (CAN, SPI, I2C, UART, Ethernet), and device lifecycle management.
Experience with CI/CD pipelines, build automation, and deployment workflows for systems that include hardware-in-the-loop or physical device dependencies.
Strong troubleshooting skills across hardware, software, and integration layers with a systematic debugging methodology.
Ability to work across team boundaries, engage with stakeholders who have different technical vocabularies, and translate hardware requirements into platform features.
Strong communication and documentation skills with the ability to capture and share integration knowledge across teams.
Ownership mentality and comfort working on a small, greenfield team where everyone contributes across the stack.

Nice To Haves

Experience building platforms, tooling, or services that manage physical hardware as allocatable resources (IaaS, lab automation, test infrastructure, fleet management).
Background in automotive software development, ECU integration, or hardware-in-the-loop testing environments.
Hands-on experience with automotive communication protocols such as CAN, LIN, DoIP, or UDS in a development or integration context.
Experience with embedded Linux distributions (Yocto, Buildroot), device trees, or kernel-level configuration for hardware bring-up.
Familiarity with HashiCorp stack (Nomad, Consul, Vault) for orchestration, service discovery, and secrets management.
Experience developing Nomad device plugins or similar resource abstraction mechanisms for orchestration platforms.
Understanding of firmware update mechanisms (OTA, flashing tools) and hardware provisioning workflows.
Experience with observability stacks including Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, distributed tracing, and structured logging.
Background in lab automation, hardware validation, or test infrastructure engineering.
Experience migrating from legacy infrastructure to modern platforms whilst maintaining service reliability and business continuity.
Track record of mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction across teams.

Responsibilities

Design and build integration tooling and agent services in Go that connect automotive test hardware to the platform's cloud-native control plane, enabling automated hardware discovery, state reporting, and lifecycle management.
Develop provisioning workflows that coordinate firmware flashing, health checks, power cycling, and resource validation across diverse bench configurations, working with existing vendor tools and automotive protocols.
Engage with embedded engineering teams and bench users to understand their hardware workflows, identify pain points, and translate those findings into platform features and automation tooling.
Build hardware abstraction layers that present heterogeneous bench hardware (varying ECU configurations, communication interfaces, firmware versions) as clean, allocatable resources to the platform's scheduler and API.
Contribute to core platform services in Go including the API, scheduler, and CLI tooling, bringing a hardware-aware perspective to architecture and design decisions.
Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines for firmware build automation, integration testing, and deployment workflows that span both platform services and hardware-facing components.
Document hardware integration patterns, protocol quirks, and operational knowledge to build institutional understanding across the team.
Collaborate with stakeholders across Infrastructure Engineering, Quality Engineering, and Hardware Infrastructure to define integration requirements, validate platform capabilities against real-world bench workflows, and drive adoption.