Principal Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

Description

The Role

The rapid adoption of advanced software in modern vehicles is transforming the automotive industry, introducing increasingly complex, large-scale distributed systems that must operate with exceptional reliability, performance, and security.

As a Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at General Motors, you will be part of a team that applies software engineering principles to reliability and operations . The team designs and builds systems that scale sustainably by embedding reliability into the software itself-through automation, observability, and resilient architecture-rather than relying on manual operations.

SREs at GM operate as production-focused software engineers , partnering closely with product and platform teams to design, build, and operate services in production. This role emphasizes code ownership, systems design, and engineering for reliability , with a strong focus on automation, observability, and shared responsibility for services in production.

This is a hands-on Individual Contributor (IC) role . As a Software Engineer on the SRE team, you will design and implement software solutions that improve the reliability, efficiency, and performance of our services. You will write and maintain production-quality code, build automation and tooling, participate in incident response, and drive long-term improvements across our infrastructure. The expectation is sustained technical depth and active engagement across the full lifecycle of systems-from design and implementation to operation and continuous improvement.

What You'll Do

• Design and build software, tools, and frameworks that improve system reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency.
• Apply established reliability patterns (e.g., graceful degradation, retries, backoff, circuit breaking) in production systems.
• Develop automation to eliminate manual operational work, including deployment tooling, self-service platforms, and remediation workflows.
• Improve developer experience by building reusable reliability tooling and abstractions.
• Design, implement, and evolve observability systems (metrics, logs, traces) that enable deep visibility into system behavior.
• Enable proactive detection, faster diagnosis, and effective resolution of production issues.
• Participate in an on-call rotation to diagnose and resolve production incidents.
• Lead technical mitigation efforts during incidents and ensure rapid restoration of service.
• Partner with software development teams to ensure systems are designed for reliability from the outset.
• Practice shared ownership of production services, reinforcing a "you build it, you run it" culture.
• Define, implement, and manage SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs to align reliability targets with business priorities.
• Use data to guide trade-offs between feature velocity, reliability, and operational risk.
• Lead and contribute to post-incident reviews with a strong focus on engineering outcomes.
• Drive systemic improvements that prevent recurrence and improve long-term system health.
• Evaluate system performance and architecture to identify optimizations that reduce infrastructure costs while maintaining or improving reliability.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Java) with experience building and maintaining production-quality systems.
• Strong understanding of operating systems, networking, distributed systems, databases, and storage systems.
• Deep understanding of how software executes on hardware, including algorithms, data structures, memory, and CPU utilization, with the ability to optimize and troubleshoot performance issues.
• Hands-on experience managing production systems, responding to incidents, performing root cause analysis, and mitigating complex failures.
• Demonstrated experience building automation, CI/CD pipelines, deployment systems, or configuration management solutions.
• Ability to clearly communicate technical concepts across engineering and non-engineering stakeholders, with a strong sense of shared ownership.

• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure).
• Experience with containerization and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
• Proven experience designing, building, or operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Prior experience running Java-based systems in production

• The salary range for this role is $201,600 - $381,700 base salary. The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position.

• Bonus Potential: An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.

• 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.