Engineering Manager, Observability

About General Motors

Our vision at General Motors is a world with Zero Crashes, Zero Emissions, and Zero Congestion. We embrace the responsibility to lead the change that will make our world better, safer, and more equitable for all.

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About the AI Cloud and Developer Infrastructure Organization

The AI Cloud and Developer Infrastructure organization is responsible for delivering and maintaining the tools and services engineers at GM use every day to do their best work and drive our cars forward. We focus on enhancing the entire development process for engineers at GM – from 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 of an Engineering Manager, Observability

We are looking for an Engineering Manager, Observability with a deep technical background, experience building and running engineering teams, and who is passionate about developer productivity. As a leader on this team, you will care deeply about the technical development of engineers both on and off the team and effectively balance the needs and priorities of the business, our users, and the growth of our engineers.

This leader will start delivering impact through observability frameworks and will evolve depending on business needs. You will be expected to identify high ROI investments with minimal guidance.

What You'll Do (Responsibilities)

• 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.

Minimum Qualifications (Must-Have)

• Leadership experience: 5+ years of experience leading software or site reliability engineering (SRE) teams and balancing the tradeoff between velocity and reliability.
• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience.
• 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.

Preferred Qualifications (Nice-to-Have)

• Management experience: 3+ years of experience managing software engineering or site reliability engineering (SRE) teams.
• 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.

Compensation and Benefits

The salary range for this Engineering Manager, Observability role is $200,000 to $285,000. The actual base salary will vary based on factors relevant to the position. An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.

GM offers a variety of health and wellbeing benefit programs, including medical, dental, vision, Health Savings Account, Flexible Spending Accounts, retirement savings plan, sickness and accident benefits, life insurance, paid vacation & holidays, tuition assistance programs, employee assistance program, and GM vehicle discounts.

Upon successful completion of a motor vehicle report review, you will be eligible to participate in a company vehicle evaluation program, through which you will be assigned a General Motors vehicle to drive and evaluate. Program participants are required to purchase/lease a qualifying GM vehicle every four years unless an exception applies.

Key skills/competency

• Engineering Leadership
• Observability
• Prometheus
• Grafana
• OpenTelemetry
• Distributed Systems
• Cloud Computing (GCP/AWS/Azure)
• Kubernetes
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Team Development