General Motors

Staff Systems Engineer - Autonomy Behavior

General Motors • $189K — $290K *
Sunnyvale, CA 94087In-Person
Aerospace & Defense
8 - 10 years of experience
Today
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Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Master's degree in systems engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, or a related field; advanced degree is a plus.
  • 8+ years in systems engineering, autonomous vehicles, or safety-critical validation.
  • Proven record evaluating autonomous vehicles for commercial fleets or high-stakes product decisions.
  • Strong systems engineering fundamentals including architecture and verification planning.
  • Experience defining simulation evaluation at scale, balancing trade-offs like coverage and validity.
  • Proficient in Python for production-quality analysis software and validation tools.
  • Strong communication skills for cross-team alignment and leadership.

Responsibilities

  • Set systems engineering approach for behavior validation from requirements to release.
  • Lead validation strategy for major capabilities, connecting safety claims and compliance.
  • Direct behavior evaluation and simulation across various testing scenarios.
  • Guide technical reviews and validation tools toward repeatable processes.
  • Translate complex validation results into clear recommendations.

Benefits

  • Variety of health and wellbeing benefit programs including medical, dental, and vision.
  • Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Accounts.
  • Retirement savings plan along with life insurance.
  • Paid vacation and holidays, facilitating work-life balance.
  • Tuition assistance programs to support continued education.
  • Employee assistance program.
  • GM vehicle discounts for employees.
Full Job Description
Job Description

Role
As a Staff Autonomy Behavior Systems Engineer, you will set the technical direction for how autonomous vehicle behavior is specified, evaluated, and supported by evidence. You will work across behavior, software, simulation, safety, legal, product, and operations to build a validation system that supports sound safety and launch decisions and can run continuously.
You will bring deep experience evaluating autonomous vehicles in commercial fleets and understand the difference between a test that produces a result and a validation system people can trust. You will connect requirements, scene definitions, metrics, acceptance criteria, coverage, simulation validity, human references, and the decision process around the result.
What You'll Do
  • Set the systems engineering approach for behavior validation from product requirements through release and monitoring, including behavior decomposition, metrics, acceptance criteria, coverage, confidence, and traceability.
  • Lead validation strategy for major capabilities and cross-cutting behaviors by connecting safety claims, legal and compliance expectations, hazard analysis, requirements, simulation tests, and release evidence.
  • Set the direction for behavior evaluation and simulation at scale across synthetic tests, road data, and counterfactual references, including scenario sourcing, sampling, orchestration, data quality, and reproducibility.
  • Lead cross-functional technical reviews and guide validation tools, data pipelines, simulation workflows, and analysis products toward repeatable systems; turning complex results into clear recommendations.


Required Qualifications
  • Master's degree in systems engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, or a related field. Advanced degree is a plus.
  • 8 or more years of professional experience in systems engineering, autonomous vehicles, robotics, vehicle development, simulation, or safety-critical validation.
  • A proven record of evaluating autonomous vehicles for a commercial fleet, launch, supervised release, or other high-consequence product decision.
  • Deep systems engineering fundamentals, including architecture and decomposition, use-case and scene modeling, requirements strategy, interface definition, verification and validation planning, and traceability.
  • Professional experience defining or leading simulation evaluation at scale, including the trade-offs between coverage, confidence, runtime, cost, and simulation validity.
  • Strong Python experience. You should be comfortable reading and writing production-quality analysis or validation software, reviewing designs and pull requests, and using code to test an engineering idea quickly.
  • Strong communication skills and the ability to create alignment among teams with different goals, terminology, and technical perspectives.
  • Demonstrated stakeholder management and technical leadership across organizational boundaries. You have led work through influence, not only through formal authority.
  • Evidence of setting direction beyond a single project, such as establishing a methodology, framework, lifecycle, platform, standard, or reusable validation process adopted by other engineers or teams.


What Will Give You a Competitive Edge
  • Human benchmarking for behavior and safety evaluation, including attentive human benchmark construction, human percentile methods, expert review, and the limits of human references.
  • Counterfactual analysis in simulation, including AV versus human or AV versus alternate-policy comparisons under matched scene conditions.
  • Experience building or using a safety case, writing or reviewing safety claims, and determining what validation evidence is needed to support those claims.
  • Strong familiarity with hazard analysis and structured safety methods such as STPA, FMEA, fault trees, scenario-based hazard analysis, or equivalent approaches.
  • Experience with risk quantification, risk acceptance, severity and exposure reasoning, risk budgets, and mitigation decisions.
  • Experience turning legal or regulatory expectations into a defensible compliance strategy with requirements, metrics, test coverage, and documented claims.
  • Experience designing validation lifecycles that connect scope definition, requirements, hazard analysis, coverage planning, test generation, scorecards, release decisions, and continuous monitoring.
  • Experience building or guiding validation scorecards, confidence rubrics, behavior protocols, or similar products used by multiple engineering teams.
  • Experience reducing manual expert review through well-designed automation while preserving expert judgment where it matters.
  • A track record of developing other engineers, leading technical communities, and making a broader organization better at systems engineering and validation.


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 may not be representative for positions located outside of New York, Colorado, California, or Washington.
• The salary range for this role: is $189,300 to $290,700. The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position.
• Bonus Potential: An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.
• Benefits: GM offers a variety of health and wellbeing benefit programs. Benefit options include 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, GM vehicle discounts and more

About General Motors

General Motors Company engages in the manufacture and sale of cars and trucks in the United States, China, Brazil, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Italy. It offers sedans, crossovers, sport utility vehicles, pick-up trucks, coupes, sports/convertibles and hybrid vehicles, hatchbacks/wagons, and vans, as well as mini cars in India. The company also provides parts and accessories, such as iPod and MP3 compatibility, mobility accessories, performance parts, AC parts and services, and merchandise. In addition, it offers vehicle safety, security, and information services. The company provides used vehicles. It offers its products through dealers and distributors. General Motors Company was formerly known as NGMCO, Inc. and changed its name to General Motors Company in July 2009. The company was incorporated in 2009 and is based in Detroit, Michigan. It operates manufacturing facilities in India, the United States, and Canada. General Motors Company operates as a subsidiary of the United States Department of The Treasury. General Motors led global vehicle sales for 77 consecutive years from 1931 through 2007, longer than any other automaker, and is currently among the world's largest automakers by vehicle unit sales. General Motors acts in most countries outside the USA via wholly-owned subsidiaries but operates in China through 10 joint ventures. GM's OnStar subsidiary provides vehicle safety, security, and information services. In 2009, General Motors shed several brands, closing Saturn, Pontiac, and Hummer, and emerged from a government-backed Chapter 11 reorganization. In 2010, GM made an initial public offering IPOs to date and returned to profitability later that year.

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Learn more about General Motors
Size
157,000 employees
Market Cap
$46.9 billion
Industry
Manufacturing & Automotive
Net Income
$6.4 billion
Founded
1908
5 Year Trend
-3.2%
Revenue
$122.4 billion
NASDAQ
GM
* Ladders Estimates

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