Technical Lead - Validation, Tools, Acceleration (VTA)

Employment Type: Full-time

Position Overview

As a Technical Lead within the Validation, Tools, Acceleration (VTA) team, you will be a senior individual contributor responsible for building and optimizing the infrastructure and technology for all testing and evaluation workflows. This includes developing and optimizing data processing pipelines for large-scale analysis. Your role will involve defining and shaping the technical vision and strategy to ensure alignment with broader company objectives, and designing and implementing systems to support AV/ADAS development. You will drive software engineering best practices within the team and develop tools that promote these standards company-wide.

Remote Work: This role is based remotely. However, if you live within a 50-mile radius of Atlanta, Austin, Detroit, Warren, Milford, or Mountain View, you are expected to report to that location at least three times a week.

About the Organization

The Validation, Tools, Acceleration (VTA) team builds world-class testing and analysis related products and technologies to enable GM to accelerate the development of autonomous vehicles. Our customers include AV developers who need to understand the effects of their code on vehicle behavior, data engineers who use our data pipelines to derive insights for various evaluation needs, and the release team who track top-line performance metrics on releases. VTA aims to deliver intuitive user experiences for robotics and AI engineers that accelerate GM towards a driverless future. VTA is building the core infrastructure and architecture to support testing at scale. As part of this team, you will build the infrastructure and required technology for test organization, test triggering, and test analysis workflows, along with the related data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Act as a technical architect, helping to define the technical vision and strategy, and ensuring the technical direction of your team aligns with broader company objectives.
• Design and implement systems capable of supporting the simulation of millions of miles of driving every day to predict on-road performance.
• Improve and deliver reliable software through continuous integration, automated testing, and code reviews.
• Drive software engineering best practices within your team and develop tools that promote these standards company-wide.
• Develop and oversee top-tier software engineers within a dynamic, fast-paced, and inclusive setting.
• Help define, build, and embody GM engineering culture and principles.

Skills & Abilities

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated track record of building high-quality dev productivity tools with a focus on operational excellence.
• Broad exposure to the end-to-end product engineering stack, from frontend to infrastructure.
• Experience with SOA or microservice-based architectures, large-scale distributed systems, and common cloud platforms like AWS/GCP.
• Strong organizational and communication skills.
• Self-motivation and passion to lead, encourage best practices, and constantly improve.
• Familiarity with Python, Go, Node, React, or other web development frameworks/languages.
• Experience with PostgreSQL (or similar relational databases) and data warehouse technologies like BigQuery or Amazon Redshift.
• Passion for self-driving technology and its potential impact on the world.

Competitive Edge

• A background in robotics, ROS, or the AV/ADAS industry.
• Scientific Analysis experience.
• Experience building and managing engineering teams.
• Experience writing modern production C++ applications.
• Experience developing high-quality software under significant latency and performance constraints.
• Experience developing or working with safety-critical code.

Compensation

The compensation information is a good faith estimate only. It is based on what a successful applicant might be paid in accordance with applicable state laws. The compensation...