Principal Engineer, AI Acceleration

Job Description

About Us

Core IT is responsible for delivering and maintaining the technology, platforms, and services that help teams across GM do their best work. We support product, design, engineering, manufacturing, operations, and corporate functions by improving the tools, workflows, and technology experiences they rely on every day. Our goal is to provide secure, reliable, and seamless technology that helps employees spend less time navigating friction and more time solving the problems that matter most in their domains.

The Role

At General Motors, we are using AI to simplify how work gets done—reducing manual effort, removing friction, and helping engineers and business teams focus on higher-value outcomes.

As a Principal Engineer, AI Acceleration, you will identify high-leverage opportunities, then design, build, and scale AI-powered tools that measurably improve how people work. You will operate at the intersection of software engineering, AI/LLM capabilities, product thinking, and organizational change. This is a hands-on technical leadership role. This isn’t a research or advisory role. You’ll ship tools people use every day and aim for step changes of 10x to 100x, not incremental gains.

For example, our design team’s brand guidelines live in Figma. Instead of maintaining static templates, we built an AI skill that reads the guidelines directly, drafts on-brand presentations, and runs a linter that catches off-brand choices. Work that took days now takes minutes, and the guidelines stay the single source of truth. You’d find and build the next dozen of these.

You will work directly with product, design, engineering, manufacturing, operations, and corporate-function teams to understand the problems behind the requests. You will move quickly from discovery and prototyping to production-quality solutions, while maintaining appropriate standards for security, privacy, reliability, responsible AI, and supportability.

The right person is comfortable creating clarity where there is no specification, switching between executive-level strategy and technical implementation, and measuring success by outcomes.

What You’ll Do

• Find high-leverage opportunities: Embed with teams across GM to identify slow, manual, repetitive, or error-prone work where AI can create a step-change in speed, quality, or user experience.
• Prototype and deliver quickly: Build and test working solutions, validate value with users, and move successful prototypes into reliable, maintainable, supported production capabilities.
• Build on approved platforms: Develop solutions using GM-approved AI and enterprise technologies, integrating with the systems where work already happens, such as Google Workspace, Figma, Jira, enterprise data platforms, and other relevant services.
• Apply strong engineering discipline: Establish appropriate practices for requirements, architecture, testing, observability, security, privacy, access control, deployment, incident response, and lifecycle management. Partner with security, legal, privacy, and risk stakeholders to set practical guardrails for safe and responsible AI use.
• Measure business impact: Define success metrics and evaluate time saved, quality, adoption, cycle time, cost, and user satisfaction. Retire or revise solutions that do not produce meaningful outcomes.
• Scale what works: Convert successful implementations into reusable reference architectures, patterns, components, documentation, and enablement that other teams can adopt. Help teams adopt new ways of working and build the capability to extend solutions after initial delivery.
• Provide technical leadership: Mentor engineers, raise the quality bar through design and code reviews, and communicate tradeoffs and recommendations to technical and executive audiences.

Your Skills & Abilities

• 10+ years of progressive software engineering experience, including delivery of production software used by real customers or employees.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a Principal Engineer, senior technical leader, or equivalent role with influence across multiple teams or organizations.
• Hands-on experience designing and building AI- or LLM-enabled applications, agents, or automations across a wide range of AI tools and models, not just one or two.
• Strong understanding of LLM application patterns, including prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, context management, model selection, evaluation, and observability.
• Experience integrating AI solutions with enterprise applications, APIs, data sources, identity systems, and workflow platforms.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including architecture, APIs, distributed systems, testing, CI/CD, monitoring, security, and operational excellence.
• Ability to translate ambiguous business problems into clear product and technical strategies, then deliver working solutions through iterative development.
• Demonstrated ability to use data and user feedback to prioritize work and evaluate adoption, quality, and measurable impact.
• Demonstrated success helping people and teams adopt AI tools and keep using them after the initial rollout.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence executives, technical experts, and frontline users.
• Comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy, making decisions with incomplete information, and taking accountability for outcomes.
• A high bar for quality and craft. You care whether the output is actually good, not just whether it runs.

What Will Give You a Competitive Edge

• Experience building internal developer platforms, productivity tools, workflow automation, enterprise AI products, or employee-facing software.
• Experience with agentic systems, Model Context Protocol (MCP), AI skills, orchestration, evaluation frameworks, or multi-model solutions.
• Experience with Glean, Claude, Gemini, Figma AI, Google Workspace, Jira, or comparable enterprise AI and productivity platforms.
• Experience establishing AI engineering standards, reusable patterns, governance, or responsible-use practices in a large organization.
• Experience measuring developer or employee productivity through outcomes such as cycle time, quality, adoption, satisfaction, or cost avoidance.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and building communities of practice.
• Experience with creative or design workflows, enterprise data systems, or manufacturing and automotive environments.

GM does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role. Do not apply for this role if you will need GM immigration sponsorship now or in the future. This includes direct company sponsorship, entry of GM as the immigration employer of record on a government form, and any work authorization requiring a written submission or other immigration support from the company (e.g., H1-B, OPT, STEM OPT, CPT, TN, J-1, etc).

This role is based remotely, but if the selected candidate lives within a specific mile radius of a GM hub, they will be expected to report to the location three times a week {or other frequency dictated by your manager}.

Relocation benefits are available for candidates who qualify under company policy.

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.

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.

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