Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Employment Type

Full time

Job Description

The rapid adoption of advanced software in vehicles marks a new era for automakers and consumers, bringing both advantages and challenges.

As part of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) at General Motors, you'll join a dedicated team focused on enhancing the reliability, efficiency, and scalability of our distributed systems. We leverage engineering principles to manage operations effectively and build solutions that enable us to grow without sacrificing performance or quality. Our SREs work closely with software development teams, acting as specialists in reliability and production engineering, with a focus on automation, observability, and shared responsibility.

We are looking for individuals who are passionate about maintaining the health of our infrastructure while optimising for reliability and cost-efficiency. This role involves a blend of software engineering and systems engineering skills to keep our services resilient, robust, and scalable.

This role is for a hands-on position as an Individual Contributor (IC). As an SRE IC, you will focus on enhancing the reliability, efficiency, and performance of our services. You'll work closely with other engineers to develop automated solutions, respond to incidents, and drive improvements across our infrastructure. The expectation for this role is that you will maintain a hands-on approach, whether it's through scripting, troubleshooting incidents, or improving observability. As an IC, you will be at the forefront of solving technical challenges and making impactful improvements that directly enhance the quality of service for our users. The role requires a blend of software engineering and systems engineering skills to address complex production challenges effectively.

Key Responsibilities

• Automation and Reliability Improvements: Develop tools and software to automate operational processes, improve system reliability, and reduce manual intervention.
• Observability and Monitoring: Lead, Implement and improve monitoring and observability frameworks, enabling proactive detection and resolution of incidents.
• Incident Response: Participate in an on-call rotation to diagnose, troubleshoot, and mitigate production incidents, ensuring minimal downtime and swift resolution.
• Collaboration with Development Teams: Work alongside developers to ensure the quality, scalability, and reliability of our services. Practice shared ownership of services in production, fostering a "You build it, you run it" culture.
• Service Level Management: Manage Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to manage reliability expectations effectively.
• Engineering for Reliability: Strong understanding of common application reliability patterns, with hands-on experience implementing them.
• Failure Analysis and Post-Incident Reviews: Conduct deep-dive analyses of incidents and collaborate on post-incident reviews to derive learnings and prevent recurrence. Champion a culture of continuous improvement.
• Cost Efficiency: Evaluate system performance and advocate for optimisations that reduce infrastructure costs while maintaining service reliability.

Skills and Qualifications

• Programming Skills: Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Java) and familiarity with multiple language ecosystems.
• Systems Knowledge: Solid understanding of operating systems, networking, distributed systems, databases, and storage architectures.
• Strong Understanding of System Fundamentals: Deep understanding of how code runs on underlying hardware, including operating systems, algorithms, and data structures. Ability to optimize or troubleshoot code by understanding its execution and the impact on system resources.
• Incident Management: Experience handling production incidents, including root cause analysis, mitigation, and working through complex system failures.
• Communication and Collaboration: