Engineering Manager Observability

Job Description

About Us 

The AV Developer Productivity organization is responsible for delivering and maintaining the tools and services engineers here at GM use every day to do their best work and drive our autonomous vehicle program forward. Tools and services we work on enhancing the entire development process of engineers at GM — how/where code is checked out, modified, compiled, tested, merged, and eventually deployed. Our goal is to ensure our AV engineers and others here have world class tools and a seamless development experience so that they can focus on the problems that matter most in their domain. 

The Role 

We are looking for an Engineering Manager with an extensive engineering background, experience using a variety of developer tools and technologies, and who is passionate about developer productivity. As a leader on this team, we are looking for someone who cares deeply about the technical development of other engineers on the team and is able to effectively balance the needs and priorities of the business, our users, and the growth of our engineers. This person will start delivering impact through observability frameworks and will evolve depending on business needs but they will be expected to identify high ROI investments with minimal guidance.
 

The Team 

As a part of AV Developer Productivity, the AV Observability team is responsible for creating and maintaining a robust, reliable, and cohesive observability offering for AV developers and leaders across GM to optimize internal and external system performance and reliability. We achieve this through a combination of internally developed tools, vendor tools, and agentic AI workflows. 

What You’ll Do

• Team leadership: Manage and grow a team of engineers, conducting performance reviews, providing coaching, and supporting career development.

• Technical strategy: Define and execute the technical vision and roadmap for the observability platform, ensuring it provides actionable insights into complex systems.

• Architectural oversight: Provide technical guidance on instrumentation, logging, metrics, and tracing to ensure comprehensive visibility across GM’s AV software stack.

• Incident response: Ensure the team's tools enable rapid detection, debugging, and resolution of unknown or unforeseen system failures to minimize downtime.

• Cross-functional collaboration: Work with other engineering teams—such as those developing AI/ML, firmware, and infrastructure—to implement observability practices and improve system reliability.

• Platform development: Lead the development of internal tools and data pipelines to collect, analyze, and visualize telemetry data at a massive scale.

• Vendor management: Manage relationships and costs associated with third-party observability software and platforms.

Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications) 

• Management experience: 7+ years of proven leadership experience managing software or site reliability engineering (SRE) teams

• Observability expertise: Deep understanding of core observability pillars: logs, metrics, and traces. Experience with technologies like Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and log management systems is crucial

• Software architecture: Strong background in designing, developing, and architecting distributed systems, cloud-native applications, and microservices

• Programming proficiency: Familiarity with Go, Python, Typescript or similar along with software development practices to inform code reviews and architectural decisions

• Cloud infrastructure: Experience with modern cloud offerings like GCP, AWS, or Azure and technologies like CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes, and Docker

• Communication skills: Excellent interpersonal and communication skills to collaborate effectively with diverse teams and stakeholders

• Relevant Technologies: GCP, Go, Python, Typescript, OpenTelemetry

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge (Preferred Qualifications)

• Experience working with GCP, AWS, or Azure

• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, Istio, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana, TSDBs and observability pipelines (e.g. either for logging or metrics or tracing)

• Skilled in defining and instrumenting SLIs and SLOs

• Own or contribute to Open Source projects

• Passion for self-driving technology and its potential impact on the world

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