General Motors
Principal Software Engineer - Autonomy Behavior Validation
$239K–$366K
Sunnyvale, California, United States of America · Remote/Hybrid · Principal · Full-time · Posted Sep 3, 2026
- Experience
- 10 or more years; no alternative stated.
- Education
- Master’s degree in systems engineering, mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, robotics, human factors, or a related field.
About the job
Sets technical direction and builds a validated, scalable counterfactual simulation product that turns autonomous-vehicle incidents and scenarios into evidence for engineering, safety, release, and launch decisions.
What you'll do
- Define architecture and workflows for counterfactual behavior evaluation, scenario reconstruction, simulation, and outcome analysis.
- Build and validate human and other road-user response models, benchmarks, and simulation pipelines.
- Lead cross-functional validation and communicate results, limitations, and recommendations for safety and release decisions.
What they ask for
- Master’s degree in a listed engineering, computer science, robotics, human factors, or related field.
- 10 or more years of professional experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics, vehicle development, simulation, systems engineering, human factors, or safety-critical validation.
- Record of evaluating autonomous vehicles for a commercial fleet, launch, supervised release, or other high-consequence product decision; deep experience with counterfactual, replay, crash reconstruction, incident analysis, or comparable simulation-based evaluation.
- Strong Python and agentic workflow experience, plus simulation evaluation at scale and technical leadership across organizational boundaries.
Nice to have
- Experience operationalizing attentive-human benchmarks or reconstructing traffic collisions and incidents.
- Experience with collision severity, risk quantification, safety cases, simulation validation, or translating legal or regulatory expectations into defensible evidence.
Pay
$238,700 to $365,700 USD base salary
Tools
Python
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