Principle Systems Engineer - Autonomy Behavior Validation

• The Role As a Principal Autonomy Behavior Systems Engineer, you will be the technical authority for how GM's autonomous vehicle behavior is defined, evaluated, and judged ready for release.
• You know how the autonomy stack produces behavior, where it fails, and what evidence a behavior needs before it is ready for a self-driving fleet.

Responsibilities

• Your scope covers the full range of driving behaviors, from routine maneuvers to rare, safety-critical events.
• It also covers the whole validation lifecycle, from product requirements through launch and continuous monitoring in the fleet.
• You will bring broad, deep expertise in autonomous driving.
• 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 earns the trust of the engineers and leaders who depend on it.
• You'll Do Set the long-term technical strategy and systems engineering approach for autonomy behavior validation across capabilities, programs, and releases.
• This includes behavior decomposition, metrics, acceptance criteria, coverage, confidence, and traceability.
• Define what "ready" means for autonomous behavior.
• Connect safety claims, hazard analysis, and requirements to the evidence behind supervised release, driverless launch, and continuous release decisions, and present those recommendations to senior leadership.
• Act as the organization's go-to expert on autonomous driving behavior.
• Diagnose complex issues across perception, prediction, planning, and controls, and lead the work to close behavioral escapes and coverage gaps using fleet and incident data.
• Design validation strategies that combines simulation, road data, closed-course testing, human references, and expert review.
• Make deliberate trade-offs among coverage, confidence, fidelity, runtime, and cost.
• Guide validation tools, data pipelines, scorecards, and AI-assisted or agentic workflows toward repeatable, scalable products used by many teams.
• Lead cross-functional technical reviews, mentor engineers, and raise the bar for systems engineering and validation across the AV organization.

Requirements

• Qualifications Master's degree in systems engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, or a related field, and 10 or more years of professional experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, simulation, systems engineering, or safety-critical validation.
• A proven record of evaluating autonomous vehicles for a self-driving fleet, launch, supervised release, or other high-consequence product decision, including owning or materially shaping the go/no-go recommendation.
• how each part of the stack (perception, prediction, planning, and controls) shows up as on-road behavior across a wide range of scenarios, road users, and operating conditions.
• Deep systems engineering fundamentals, including decomposition, ODD definition, requirements strategy, V&V planning, and traceability, plus experience leading simulation evaluation at scale.
• Strong Python and agentic workflow experience.
• You are comfortable designing and reviewing production-quality analysis and validation software and using code to investigate an engineering question quickly.
• Demonstrated technical leadership across organizational boundaries, including setting direction adopted beyond a single team and explaining results, assumptions, and limitations clearly to engineers and senior leaders.
• Will Give You a Competitive Edge Experience as a technical lead for validating a driverless commercial launch or an expansion into new operating domains.
• Experience evaluating learned or end-to-end driving systems, including how to characterize their behavior, regressions, and generalization.
• Experience with human benchmarking (such as attentive-human benchmarks) and counterfactual or replay methods, and how they fit within a broader validation strategy.
• Experience building or using a safety case, and familiarity with hazard analysis methods (STPA, FMEA, fault trees) and standards such as ISO 21448 (SOTIF), UL 4600, or ISO 26262.
• Experience with risk quantification and risk acceptance, and with turning legal or regulatory expectations into a defensible compliance strategy.
• Experience designing validation lifecycles, scorecards, confidence rubrics, or behavior protocols used by many engineering teams.

Pay

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 $238,700 to $365,700.

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.

Benefits

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