Staff Systems Software Engineer, Infrastructure Platform

The Role

The Infrastructure Engineering organisation at GM is building a cloud-native platform that transforms how developers interact with automotive test hardware. This platform treats physical benches, mobile rigs, and virtual environments as cloud-native compute resources, enabling automated discovery, intelligent provisioning, and remote development workflows. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will architect and build the core platform services including the API gateway, scheduler, lifecycle orchestration, and developer tooling that enables hundreds of engineers to discover, reserve, and run workloads on automotive hardware with the same ease as spinning up a cloud VM. This is a highly visible technical leadership role where your decisions will shape the platform architecture, developer experience, and operational model whilst mentoring team members and driving engineering best practices. If you're excited about building greenfield infrastructure that solves real developer problems and scales across hundreds of automotive test benches, this role offers the opportunity to shape a platform that transforms automotive software development at GM scale.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement core platform services including the API gateway, scheduler, lifecycle orchestrator, and synchronisation services using Go and cloud-native patterns.
• Build RESTful APIs with authentication (OIDC, RBAC), authorisation, versioning, and observability, architecting the inventory database system using PostgreSQL for resource metadata, capabilities, and state management.
• Develop intelligent scheduling and orchestration logic that matches workload requirements to resource capabilities with support for automated pooling, reservation modes, and hybrid allocation strategies.
• Build developer CLI tooling and integrate with the control plane, enabling developers to discover, allocate, and manage infrastructure resources through intuitive commands.
• Implement provisioning workflows that coordinate firmware flashing, health checks, power cycling, and resource validation across diverse automotive hardware configurations.
• Collaborate with stakeholders across Infrastructure Engineering, Quality Engineering, and Hardware Infrastructure to understand workflows and integrate with existing systems.
• Lead architectural discussions, conduct code reviews, document technical decisions, and mentor team members on distributed systems patterns and Go development.
• Work with tools and technologies including Go, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Nomad, Consul, RESTful APIs with OIDC authentication and RBAC authorisation, Datadog, S3-compatible object storage (MinIO), CI/CD pipelines, and Git/GitHub.

Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications)

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a strong track record of building and operating production distributed systems.
• Deep platform or infrastructure engineering experience, with hands-on work building APIs, schedulers, orchestrators, or similar systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in Go, with ability to write clean, maintainable, and performant production code for backend services.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals including consistency models, failure handling, idempotency, retry patterns, and circuit breakers.
• Experience with cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes, Nomad, Consul, or similar orchestration and service discovery platforms.
• Strong API design skills with understanding of RESTful patterns, authentication and authorisation models (OIDC, RBAC), versioning strategies, and error handling.
• Deep experience with relational databases, particularly PostgreSQL, including schema design, indexing strategies, query optimisation, and migration management.
• Architectural thinking with ability to evaluate trade-offs, balance simplicity with flexibility, design for current requirements and future growth, and document decisions effectively.
• Strong communication skills with ability to explain complex technical concepts to both engineering and business stakeholders.
• Ownership mentality and comfort with "you build it, you run it" culture from initial design through deployment, monitoring, and production incident response.

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge (Preferred Qualifications)

• Experience building Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) systems that manage physical or virtual resources.
• Background in automotive software development, embedded systems, or hardware-in-the-loop testing environments.
• Hands-on experience with HashiCorp stack (Nomad, Consul, Vault) for orchestration, service discovery, and secrets management.
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation.
• Experience with observability stacks including Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, distributed tracing, and structured logging.
• Understanding of security best practices for multi-tenant systems, secrets management, compliance requirements, and defence in depth strategies.
• Experience with event-driven architectures, message queues (Kafka, NATS, Redis Streams), and stream processing systems.
• Knowledge of GraphQL API design and implementation.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction across teams.
• Experience migrating from legacy infrastructure to modern platforms whilst maintaining service reliability and business continuity.

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