Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer

GM is working toward a future defined by Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions and Zero Congestion. Achieving that goal requires sustained investment in the people, software, and systems that support safer, better, and more sustainable transportation. We are continuing to build our team of passionate software engineers who bring technical depth, independent judgment, genuine enthusiasm for building software, and a high standard for production quality to this work.

Vision and Automation Services is an organization within General Motors that builds innovative software solutions for global manufacturing, with a strong focus on vision-as-a-service capabilities, automation, and AI enablement. Our teams combine modern cloud platforms, plant-floor systems, computer-vision systems for camera-based inspection, data models and data platforms, and sophisticated AI-assisted software engineering across the development lifecycle. We also apply agentic workflows and other emerging technologies to build products that help people work more safely and efficiently.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer who can take technical ownership of substantial areas of a complex, production-critical platform. This is a challenging role with a high degree of autonomy. You will be expected to onboard quickly and understand software development across the full lifecycle, from requirements and design through testing, deployment, observability, and continuous improvement. At this level, you will also facilitate collaboration across teams, align technical dependencies and delivery plans, and help teams make and execute sound decisions. The role calls for strong technical judgment, disciplined execution, and the ability to create alignment and make progress through ambiguity. You will have a meaningful opportunity to shape technical direction and the engineering practices used to evolve the platform.

You will work across a sophisticated, highly integrated platform spanning Python and FastAPI backend services, React and TypeScript frontend applications, adjacent Java and Spring Boot services, event-driven components, cloud infrastructure, data stores, security controls, and manufacturing-system integrations. The platform is delivered through highly automated CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Azure, and GitOps tooling. You will also contribute to computer-vision and edge-to-cloud solutions such as in-plant monitoring systems, where reliable software connects cameras, plant infrastructure, machine-learning capabilities, operational services, and user-facing workflows.

This role combines strategic architecture with hands-on implementation. You will help establish engineering direction, mentor other engineers, partner with manufacturing and product leaders, and deliver scalable solutions that operate reliably in real-world plant environments. The role also values practical machine-learning expertise, including the ability to fine-tune models and productionize them for reliable inference in operational environments. The scope provides substantial opportunity for broader architectural ownership, increasing influence across teams, and shaping how the platform evolves.

What You'll Do

• Lead the architecture and delivery of scalable software capabilities used by manufacturing teams across multiple plants.
• Translate business and operational needs into clear technical requirements, service boundaries, interface contracts, and delivery plans.
• Design, build, test, and operate production-grade services across Python and FastAPI, React and TypeScript, adjacent Java and Spring Boot, and modern cloud technologies.
• Develop event-driven workflows that ingest, normalize, persist, and distribute operational data and alerts.
• Establish reliable integrations with manufacturing, workforce, equipment, analytics, and enterprise systems through well-defined APIs and messaging patterns.
• Design data models and platform solutions using databases—including relational, graph-based, and other fit-for-purpose technologies—alongside caching, object storage, and metrics platforms.
• Build secure software with strong authentication, authorization, plant-level access controls, secrets management, and defense-in-depth practices.
• Improve platform reliability through observability, health monitoring, performance engineering, automated testing, incident learning, and operational readiness.
• Lead engineering practices for highly automated continuous integration and delivery, infrastructure automation, containerized deployments, and environment promotion through GitHub, Azure, and GitOps tooling.
• Guide the evolution of shared platform capabilities so that multiple manufacturing products can reuse common services, user experiences, and operational patterns.
• Contribute to in-plant monitoring and related computer-vision solutions by helping connect plant-edge applications, cameras, machine-learning inference, cloud services, alerts, and operator workflows.
• Apply artificial intelligence thoughtfully to software engineering and manufacturing operations, including sophisticated AI-assisted development, intelligent automation, and agentic capabilities that can operate across governed tools and services.
• Contribute to machine-learning workflows by fine-tuning models, productionizing them for reliable inference, and helping establish dependable evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle practices.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and turn promising ideas into secure, maintainable prototypes and production solutions.
• Make sound architectural tradeoffs among delivery speed, maintainability, performance, security, cost, and operational complexity while facilitating alignment across teams.
• Provide technical leadership across teams by communicating decisions clearly, aligning stakeholders, promoting common engineering practices, and mentoring engineers.
• Participate in technical planning, design reviews, code reviews, troubleshooting, and other related duties as assigned.

Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications)

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including substantial experience delivering production systems.
• In-depth experience designing and developing distributed applications, microservices, APIs, and event-driven systems.
• Strong professional experience with Python and modern backend frameworks such as FastAPI.
• Strong professional experience with React, TypeScript, and modern frontend application development.
• Familiarity with Java and Spring Boot services in distributed enterprise platforms.
• Experience designing data models and working with databases, including relational, graph-based, and other fit-for-purpose technologies such as PostgreSQL.
• Experience with modern cloud and container technologies such as Azure, Docker, and Kubernetes (K8s), along with infrastructure automation and comparable DevOps practices.
• Experience building secure applications with identity, authentication, authorization, role-based access, secrets, and secure service-to-service communication.
• Experience with automated testing, continuous integration and delivery pipelines, GitHub Actions or comparable technologies, source control, and production release practices.
• Experience with observability, including structured logging, metrics, tracing, health checks, alerting, and operational dashboards.
• Experience designing and supporting integrations with enterprise or industrial systems using APIs, messaging, or event-streaming technologies.
• Ability to analyze complex systems, balance competing requirements, and make decisions that support long-term platform health.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to software engineers, product leaders, manufacturing partners, and other stakeholders.
• Willingness to travel periodically to support collaboration, plant deployments, production readiness, or other business needs.
• Ability to work effectively in a highly collaborative, cross-functional environment.

What Can Give You a Competitive Advantage (Preferred Qualifications)

• Experience leading architecture and technical strategy for a platform used across multiple products, sites, or business units.
• Experience delivering software for manufacturing, industrial automation, automotive, robotics, computer vision, or other operational environments.
• Experience with plant-edge computing, industrial cameras, device health, telemetry, or edge-to-cloud architectures.
• Experience integrating systems with different ownership models, data contracts, release cycles, and availability requirements.
• Experience with Azure services such as Event Hubs, managed databases, object storage, Key Vault, managed identity, or equivalent cloud services.
• Experience with Redis or comparable caching and real-time communication technologies.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, Helm, GitOps, Argo CD, or comparable deployment automation.
• Experience applying AI-assisted software engineering across design, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and continuous improvement, including familiarity with large-language-model-enabled development tools, retrieval-augmented generation, intelligent automation, agentic systems, or governed AI integrations.
• Experience fine-tuning machine-learning models and productionizing them for reliable inference, including model evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Familiarity with machine-learning or computer-vision systems and the software interfaces required to operate them reliably, without requiring deep specialization in model development.
• Experience evolving shared frontend and backend capabilities across multiple teams.
• Experience with data federation, graph-based models, domain ownership, or event-driven data synchronization.
• Demonstrated ability to develop, inspire, and motivate engineers through technical leadership and mentorship while fostering collaboration across organizational and functional boundaries.
• Ability to provide strategic perspective while remaining willing to work hands-on when needed, take intelligent risks, and champion change with sound judgment.
• Evidence of integrity, accountability, initiative, and ownership from concept through production operation.
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