Principal Software Engineer, Engineering Effectiveness

Job Description

The Role: 

General Motors is seeking a highly skilled and experienced professional to join our team as a Principal Software Engineer, Engineering Effectiveness. 

This role is focused on solving some of the most difficult and high-leverage engineering problems across the software development process. The person in this role will identify areas where human workflows, compute workflows, and engineering systems are operating far below their potential, then design and implement technical solutions that materially improve speed, cost, correctness, and usability. 

The ideal candidate is highly autonomous, deeply technical, and energized by problems that appear difficult, inefficient, or intractable. They should be comfortable moving between code, systems, data, workflows, and organizational habits to find the real source of inefficiency and unlock outsized improvements. This role will drive change through hands-on implementation, technical leadership, and close collaboration with partner teams. 

What You’ll Do: 

• Identify and solve high-complexity engineering problems with the potential for outsized improvements in speed, efficiency, cost, or developer effectiveness 

• Build and apply technical solutions that optimize compute-heavy and workflow-heavy parts of the software-development process 

• Analyze systems and behavioral patterns across teams and codebases to find root causes of waste, friction, duplication, or poor performance 

• Implement scalable improvements that can be applied broadly rather than solving the same problem repeatedly in isolated ways 

• Partner with teams to improve both technical systems and the engineering practices that surround them 

• Teach and enable engineers so that better patterns are understood, adopted, and sustained over time 

Your Skills and Abilities (Required Qualifications): 

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience 

• Demonstrated ability to solve unusually difficult technical problems with limited oversight and high ambiguity 

• Strong track record of delivering high-leverage technical improvements across software, automation, platforms, or engineering workflows 

• Excellent systems thinking and analytical skills, with the ability to find non-obvious sources of inefficiency and address root causes at scale 

• Deep hands-on engineering capability, including the ability to move from investigation to implementation in complex environments 

• Passion for correctness, usability, efficiency, and creating systems that make good engineering outcomes easier to achieve 

What Can Give You a Competitive Advantage (Preferred Qualifications) 

• Experience optimizing large-scale build, test, CI/CD, release, or other compute-intensive engineering workflows 

• Experience identifying broad technical patterns across a large codebase and translating those findings into durable improvements 

• Experience designing or building internal platforms, workflow tooling, dashboards, or self-service engineering systems 

• Experience improving adoption of better engineering practices across multiple teams through technical leadership and education