Senior Platform Engineer – AV Cloud Engineering

About the role

We are hiring a Senior Platform Engineer to join the Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Cloud Engineering team within AV Core Infrastructure. AV Cloud Engineering owns core IaaS and PaaS capabilities that support autonomous vehicle development and runtime environments. This role is for an engineer who treats cloud infrastructure as a product and is motivated by building a reliable, easy-to-consume platform that helps AV engineers build, test, and run faster with less operational friction. You will work on the platform capabilities, abstractions, and self-service workflows that power AV workloads at scale. You should be comfortable turning broad infrastructure problems into durable engineering solutions and improving developer velocity through software, automation, and thoughtful platform design.

This role is best suited for engineers who want to build an internal platform product for other engineers. It is less suited to candidates whose background is primarily ticket-driven infrastructure support or one-off environment operations.

What You'll Do

• Build and evolve internal platform capabilities, self-service workflows, APIs, and automation that make the right path the easiest path for AV engineering teams.
• Design clean abstractions that allow product and research teams to consume complex infrastructure, including specialized hardware such as GPUs, without deep infrastructure expertise.
• Improve platform primitives across traffic, service mesh, runtime configuration, and connectivity for distributed AV workloads.
• Reduce toil and improve reliability through reusable platform tooling, declarative automation, strong service ownership, observability, and SLIs/SLOs.
• Take ownership of complex platform initiatives from problem definition through design, implementation, and adoption.
• Partner with adjacent AV infrastructure teams to reduce developer friction and improve the reliability of the platform AV engineers depend on.
• Contribute to a healthy engineering culture through design reviews, code reviews, mentorship, and clear technical communication.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience or proven record of defining and executing technical strategy that required coordination across multiple teams, senior executives, and front-line engineers.
• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related field OR equivalent work experience.
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes in production and strong familiarity with at least one major cloud ecosystem such as GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Fully qualified proficiency in Kubernetes (GKE) and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) ecosystem, including VPC, IAM, etc.
• Hands-on experience implementing high-availability systems and managing the lifecycle of production-grade clusters.
• Strong software engineering skills in Go, Python, or similar languages, with the ability to build reusable automation, services, APIs, or controllers.
• Strong proficiency in software engineering and DevOps principles, specifically using Golang/Python and Terraform.
• Experience designing, implementing, and operating large-scale, high-availability distributed systems in production.
• Ability to operate independently in an ambiguous environment and translate high-level requirements into clear technical tasks.
• A "Growth-based Mindset" with a commitment to continuous upskilling and a belief that team capacities are developed through effort and coaching.
• Professional experience managing the trade-offs between hardware-level performance (GPU passthrough) and clean cloud abstractions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Service Mesh (Istio) and managing large-scale DNS/Traffic configurations in a global environment.
• Experience with GKE and the broader GCP ecosystem, including networking and IAM; equivalent experience with EKS/AWS or AKS/Azure is also valuable.
• Experience supporting AI/ML workloads or working with ML platforms and related tooling ecosystems.
• Experience owning or influencing platform SLOs and availability targets in production.
• Experience driving technical strategy or cross-functional alignment across multiple teams.

Pay

The salary range for this role is $170,000 to $230,000. The actual base salary a successful candidate will be offered within this range will vary based on factors relevant to the position. An incentive pay program offers payouts based on company performance, job level, and individual performance.

Schedule

This role is categorized as hybrid. The successful candidate is expected to report to the Sunnyvale or Austin office three times per week, at minimum.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Health Savings Account and Flexible Spending Accounts
• Retirement savings plan
• Sickness and accident benefits
• Life insurance
• Paid vacation and holidays
• Tuition assistance programs
• Employee assistance program
• GM vehicle discounts