Staff Engineer, AV Change Management & Assurance (GPSSC)

Description

At General Motors, our product teams are redefining mobility. Through a human-centered design process, we create vehicles and experiences that are designed not just to be seen, but to be felt. We're turning today's impossible into tomorrow's standard -from breakthrough hardware and battery systems to intuitive design, intelligent software, and next-generation safety and entertainment features.

Every day, our products move millions of people as we aim to make driving safer, smarter, and more connected, shaping the future of transportation on a global scale.

The Role

The Safety Assurance for Effective Autonomous Driving Software (SAFE-ADS) department is part of GM's Global Product Safety, Systems, and Certification (GPSSC) organization. Our mission is to help GM deliver trusted automated-driving products. As the central authority for automated driving system (ADS) safety, SAFE-ADS brings together experts from across the company to develop and maintain a comprehensive safety case including safety performance indicators for GM's automated-driving technologies.

GM's vision is zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion-and autonomous vehicle safety is essential to achieving that vision.

The Staff Engineer, AV Change Management & Assurance is responsible for driving the development, governance, and continuous improvement of the Safety Management System (SMS) and associated assurance processes. This role leads cross-functional initiatives that strengthen safety case evidence, enhance quality controls, mature internal evaluation frameworks, and ensure organizational readiness for AV deployments. The role requires balancing strategic program leadership with hands-on technical oversight, including document control, deviation management, metrics analysis, and support of enterprise-wide change management. This position serves as a key integrator across AV engineering, quality, operations, and safety functions to ensure that AV products meet the highest standards of safety, evidence generation, and organizational conformance.

What You'll Do

Strategy and Execution

• Lead development and continual improvement of the AV Internal Evaluation Program framework to assess system readiness and organizational maturity.

• Facilitate the Safety Assurance Review Board, ensuring cross-functional alignment on safety case evidence credibility and decision-making.

• Drive the AV Safety & Quality Change Management Program to ensure smooth adoption of new processes, tools, and safety governance expectations.

• Oversee the enterprise-wide AV deviation process, ensuring consistent classification, escalation, and visibility of safety-impacting deviations.

• Develop and maintain the SC3 Document Management System strategy to support traceability, evidence integrity, and scalability.

• Own publication and maintenance of the AV SMS Manual and associated enterprise SMS documentation.

• Align AV SMS safety assurance elements with broader organizational processes, quality systems, and technical governance structures.

• Manage SMS documents, records, and artifacts across controlled repositories including ADS systems.

• Track, analyze, and report Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs) and metric trends to inform internal evaluations and risk identification.

• Conduct quality control reviews of products and artifacts generated through assurance activities to ensure accuracy, completeness, and audit readiness.

• Support development and delivery of training materials and communications for new and evolving AV safety and quality processes.

• Administer and enhance workflows within the AV deviation management toolset to ensure consistent documentation and lifecycle tracking.

• Provide hands-on development and structuring of safety case evidence packages for readiness review discussions.

• Maintain structured document control practices to ensure proper versioning, approvals, traceability, and compliance with SMS expectations.

• Proven experience of 10+ years in quality management, change management, or safety management in a safety critical industry: Autonomy, Automotive, Nuclear, Aviation or similar

• Proven experience of 5+ years leading cross-functional boards/committees, drive decisions, resolve conflicts, and maintain traceability and accountability across engineering, quality and operations.

• Hands-on experience planning and executing enterprise change (process, tools, policy), including stakeholder mapping, adoption metrics, communications, and training

• Deep familiarity with document management systems and records controls (versioning, approvals, meta data, retention)

• Ability to define SPIs, build trend dashboards, perform root-cause and leading/lagging analysis, and translate insights into governance actions and evaluation outcomes.

• Experience authoring/structuring arguments and evidence packages; familiarity with Goal Structuring Notation (GSN) or equivalent argumentation patterns

• Thrive in ambiguity, crafting simplicity and order

• Effective at building consensus across different functions

• Self motivation and enthusiasm to lead complex programs, develop teams, promote collaboration, encourage standard methodologies, and constantly improve

• Knowledge of autonomous vehicle safety systems and compliance requirements for autonomous vehicle design, safety, permitting, testing, training, operations, and reporting under various regulatory regimes.

• Experience with autonomous vehicles or other sophisticated, high quality products from design through launch and scale.

• Experience with Safety Case development in robotics, aerospace, transportation or similar with familiarity balancing trades between depth and breadth of implementation.
• Experience with processes such as Engineering Change Requests, Software change management, and/or early development vehicle change management