Staff Platform Engineer, Cloud Platform

Job Description About the role We want the experience of building and running software on GM's cloud to be as good as or better than what our engineers get from the best developer platforms on their own projects. Pushing code should be quick, getting a namespace or a database should take minutes, and production should stay up without heroics. We are not there yet, and that gap is the job. This is a Staff-level, hands-on engineering role that spans the whole cloud platform. You will work across GM's internal cloud platform, the foundations underneath it, the control plane that developers interact with, and the runtime that keeps workloads healthy. You will write code, set technical direction, and raise the bar for the engineers around you.  We are hiring a small number of very strong engineers for this. If you have built a scaled platform that people chose to use because it was the easiest path, we want to talk to you. What you'll work on You will go where the hardest problems are, and today those include: • A platform people choose. Build the default way to ship software at GM so that it is easier than going around it. Move existing workloads onto it without downtime, and keep improving it based on what slows teams down. • Self-service infrastructure. Replace hand-built and ticket-driven provisioning with declarative, API-driven infrastructure, covering networking, identity and accounts. • Interfaces for people and agents. Design the APIs, CLI and MCP tools that engineers and AI agents use to get work done. Keep them simple and consistent, so no one needs another person in the loop to ship. • Reliability at scale. Design for availability and scale, including cell-based and multi-region architecture. Partner with SRE to define SLOs that mean something and remove the failures that page people at night. • Fast, safe delivery. Make the path from merge to production quick and boring, with promotion, rollback and policy built in. What you'll do • Design and build core platform capabilities end to end, from API design through production operations. • Set technical direction for one or more platform areas and write the design documents that the rest of the team builds from. • Find the biggest sources of developer toil and platform instability, and eliminate them with code and automation rather than process or headcount. • Build golden paths so that the right way to ship at GM is also the easiest way. • Use AI tooling (Cursor, Claude Code and agents) as a normal part of how you build, and help make the platform itself usable by agents through APIs and MCP. • Partner with SRE on reliability, on-call and incident reviews, and hold the platform to measurable SLOs. • Mentor senior engineers, review designs and code across teams, and model the engineering standards we want. • Work directly with application teams to understand where the platform gets in their way, then fix it. What we're looking for • Ten or more years building and operating production infrastructure or platforms, including several years in a senior or staff role with technical leadership across teams. • Deep, hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production at scale, including cluster operations, multi-tenancy, autoscaling and upgrades. • Strong software engineering skills in Go or a comparable language. You write production code, not only configuration. • Experience designing and running an internal developer platform, PaaS or cloud control plane that other engineers depend on. • Expertise with infrastructure as code and declarative provisioning (Terraform, Crossplane, or Kubernetes operators and controllers). • Solid grounding in cloud networking, identity and security, preferably on Azure. • A track record of improving reliability with SLOs, observa