Staff Software Engineer - Data

Job Description

Work Arrangement:
This role is categorized as hybrid. This means the successful candidate is expected to report to Sunnyvale or Mountain View, CA three times per week, at minimum or other frequency dictated by the business.

The Role

General Motors is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Data to provide technical leadership and architectural direction across engineering pillars that support GM Commerce. This role will be responsible for defining, influencing, and driving the long-term technical vision of our platform related to data to ensure scalability, performance, and innovation.

As a senior technical leader, you will partner with engineering managers, other engineers, and cross-functional stakeholders to establish the technical bar, enable the adoption of modern engineering practices, and deliver high-quality, customer-focused solutions. You will be expected to provide architectural guidance, conduct design/code reviews, and mentor engineering talent across multiple teams.

What You’ll Do

• Define and evolve Data Model, Schema for various entities in eCommerce systems, specially for Digital and Physical Item

• Optimize data flow and ETL processes across different systems

• Define data governance, compliance and data integrity across various systems

• Establish methodology to maintain data quality

• Performance tuning of SQL queries and ETL processes

• Drive consistent adoption of modern engineering practices, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, and resilient.

• Guide cloud-native architecture patterns leveraging Java, React, TypeScript, and modern AI/ML technologies.

• Provide technical direction and architectural guidance to engineering managers and staff engineers across all pillars.

• Serve as a trusted advisor for critical design decisions, technology adoption, and integration strategies.

• Partner with product and business stakeholders to align technical strategies with long-term business outcomes.

• Champion engineering best practices including CI/CD pipelines, observability, performance optimization, and automation.

• Ensure adherence to coding standards, design patterns, and maintainable architecture across diverse teams.

• Drive modernization initiatives such as legacy migrations and adoption of containerized, cloud-native approaches.

• Mentor and grow senior technical talent, raising overall engineering maturity.

• Foster alignment and collaboration across globally distributed engineering organizations.

• Influence leadership beyond engineering by advocating for innovation, technical investments, and platform scalability.

Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications)

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field.

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in a principal, staff, or architect-level role.

• Extensive experience in architecture and design (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems.

• Proficiency in Data Technologies – RDBMS, noSQL, Kafka, Stream processing, Spark, Python, BASH.

• Experience in one of the JVM languages, Java / Kotlin + SpringBoot.

• Proven success designing and scaling distributed, cloud-native systems and experience with at least one of the public cloud providers Azure, AWS, GCP.

• Strong understanding of security, observability, performance, and high-availability architectures.

• Demonstrated ability to influence at the organizational level, not just at the team level.

• Experience guiding multiple product areas or platforms within a large-scale, multi-pillar environment.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work.

effectively with both engineers and executives.• A passion for staying up-to-date with the latest industry trends and technologies.

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge (Preferred

Qualifications)

• Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.

• 10+ years of softwar