Principal Engineer, Autonomy Evaluation

Description
About the Organization
Join the team building GM's next generation of autonomous driving, starting with eyes-off driving on the highway and growing toward point-to-point autonomy. The goal is autonomous capability that is safe, reliable, comfortable, and scalable across GM's vehicle portfolio. Autonomy Evaluation helps the AV program figure out where the driver still falls short. Every mile our vehicles drive, on the road or in simulation, carries that signal. We turn it into answers: what is limiting the system, how big each problem is, and what fixing it is worth. Those answers steer what GM's autonomy teams build next and inform software release decisions. We partner closely with Autonomy, Simulation, Systems, Safety, and Software Validation.
The Role
As a Principal Engineer in Autonomy Evaluation, you will own how we evaluate the autonomous driver, from overall driving behavior down to individual subsystems. You'll take on questions like: How do we measure whether the car drives well, not just safely? When a behavior goes wrong, which subsystem caused it, and how much does that error matter on the road? How do we find the failures we don't know to look for? You'll turn the answers into methods other teams adopt, priorities other organizations commit to, and evidence that release decisions rely on. You'll prototype and land code yourself, and you'll grow the Staff and Senior engineers who carry the work forward. You are a senior individual contributor with no direct reports.
What You'll Do

• Set the multi-year technical direction for evaluation. Decide which questions matter most, which methods to invest in, and which to retire.
• Invent new ways to judge overall driving behavior, such as learned or VLM-based judges of driving quality, comparison with how expert humans drive, counterfactual and closed-loop analysis, and discovery of unknown failure modes in the long tail.
• Define how we evaluate subsystems such as perception, prediction, planning, and localization, including learned components, with metrics that reflect each subsystem's real effect on driving rather than accuracy alone.
• Trace bad driving back to the subsystem or interaction that caused it, and measure how subsystem errors add up to driving outcomes.
• Define how we tell whether a software or model change actually improves driving, including regression detection and version-to-version comparison, so engineering teams and release reviews get trustworthy answers quickly.
• Turn observed behavior into measured, ranked problems. Size issues with metrics and scene classifiers, build a Pareto of the problem space, and drive fixes with the teams that own them.
• Own the scientific rigor of evaluation: sampling, statistical confidence, metric validity, and agreement between simulation and road results. Make every result's assumptions and limits explicit, and resolve the hardest disagreements between signals, such as simulation versus road or a subsystem metric versus a driving metric.
• Turn results into clear recommendations for engineering and leadership: what changed, how confident we are, and what to do next.
• Mentor Staff and Senior engineers through research and design reviews and written technical direction.

Your Skills & Abilities

• 10+ years of experience in autonomous systems, robotics, ML evaluation, or applied data science, with a track record of turning analysis into decisions and shipped improvements.
• A track record of creating new evaluation or measurement methods that were adopted beyond your own team.
• Deep experience designing statistically sound evaluations of dynamic systems, including sampling, confidence intervals, experimental design, hypothesis testing, and the precision and recall of classifiers on time-series data.
• Strong production Python and SQL skills, including testing and code review.
• A record of starting from raw observations, defining and sizing the problem, and driving it to resolution with data that others trust.
• Proven ability to influence without authority: aligning peers, partner teams, and leadership on technical direction, and getting commitments from organizations you don't manage.
• Strong stakeholder engagement. You build trusted relationships with partners such as Autonomy, Simulation, Safety, and Software Validation, understand what they need from evaluation, and keep them engaged through ambiguity and disagreement.
• Experience growing senior engineers through mentorship, design reviews, and written technical direction.
• Strong ability to turn ambiguous questions and uncertain results into clear recommendations for executive, engineering, and cross-functional audiences.
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Mechanical or Aerospace Engineering, Machine Learning, Statistics, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge

• Experience in autonomous driving or field robotics, including large-scale analysis of driving logs and AV sensor data (camera, lidar, radar) from both simulation and on-road testing.
• Experience producing evaluation evidence for validation and release decisions, ideally for driver-assistance or automated-driving products.
• Experience applying VLMs or LLMs to event classification, triage, or scenario discovery.
• Experience with ML model interpretability, such as attribution, ablations, or embedding analysis.
• Strong data-visualization instincts, with the ability to turn high-dimensional metrics into clear, trustworthy views.
• Familiarity with C++, especially for reading or contributing to autonomy stack code.

Compensation

• The base salary range for this role is $250,000 to $384,600. The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position.

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.

Company Vehicle

• Upon successful completion of a motor vehicle report review, you will be eligible to participate in a company vehicle evaluation program, through which you will be assigned a General Motors vehicle to drive and evaluate.

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.
Why Join Us
We believe we all must make a choice every day - individually and collectively - to drive meaningful change through our words, our deeds and our culture. Every day, we want every employee to feel they belong to one General Motors team.
Total Rewards | Benefits Overview
From day one, we're looking out for your well-being-at work and at home-so you can focus on realizing your ambitions. Learn how GM supports a rewarding career that rewards you personally by visiting Total Rewards resources.
Non-Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunities (U.S.)
General Motors is committed to being a workplace that is not only free of unlawful discrimination, but one that genuinely fosters inclusion and belonging. We strongly believe that providing an inclusive workplace creates an environment in which our employees can thrive and develop better products for our customers.
All employment decisions are made on a non-discriminatory basis without regard to sex, race, color, national origin, citizenship status, religion, age, disability, pregnancy or maternity status, sexual orientation, gender identity, status as a veteran or protected veteran, or any other similarly protected status in accordance with federal, state and local laws.
We encourage interested candidates to review the key responsibilities and qualifications for each role and apply for any positions that match their skills and capabilities. Applicants in the recruitment process may be required, where applicable, to successfully complete a role-related assessment(s) and/or a pre-employment screening prior to beginning employment. To learn more, visit How we Hire.
Accommodations
General Motors offers opportunities to all job seekers including individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation to assist with your job search or application for employment, email us [email protected] or call us at 1-800-865-7580. In your email, please include a description of the specific accommodation you are requesting as well as the job title and requisition number of the position for which you are applying.