Engineering Manager - Sensor Alignment

At General Motors, our product teams are redefining mobility. Through a human-centered design process, we create vehicles and experiences that are designed not just to be seen, but to be felt. We’re turning today’s impossible into tomorrow’s standard —from breakthrough hardware and battery systems to intuitive design, intelligent software, and next-generation safety and entertainment features.  

Every day, our products move millions of people as we aim to make driving safer, smarter, and more connected, shaping the future of transportation on a global scale.

Role Overview:
 

We are seeking an experienced and technically adept Engineering Manager – Sensor Alignment (Sensor Calibration) to lead core teams within the SEAM Embodied AI organization. This is a people leadership role with deep technical expectations. You will be instrumental in shaping the future of autonomous driving by setting the vision for, and leading, a dedicated team that owns the end‑to‑end sensor alignment and calibration stack powering GM’s Autonomous Vehicle (AV) platforms. 

You will manage senior engineers and technical leads, set the technical direction for multi‑sensor calibration and state estimation systems, and partner closely with adjacent teams across Embodied AI and the broader AV organization. You will establish best practices for technical execution, grow technical leaders, and continue to build and uplevel a high‑impact team that directly influences on‑road performance, safety, and scalability of AV features. 
 

About the Team:

 The Sensor Alignment team builds and operates the systems that ensure every sensor on the vehicle—cameras, lidars, radars, IMUs, wheel encoders, and more—works together as a coherent, precisely calibrated perception and localization system.

The team owns: 

• Factory alignment processes that ensure sensors are accurately mounted and calibrated at production time across GM’s vehicle portfolio.  

• Onboard software and ML models for calibration and continuous alignment, enabling vehicles to monitor, detect, and correct misalignment over their lifetime. 

• Offline calibration and refinement pipelines for data collected from fleets, feeding high‑quality, well‑aligned data into model training, validation, and AV development workflows. 

• State estimation and localization interfaces that downstream perception, planning, and control stacks depend on. 

• Data quality and validation criteria for calibration signals across the loop (onboard, offboard, and in simulation). 

We leverage principled approaches from robotics, estimation theory, machine learning, and optimization, paired with modern software engineering practices, to deliver robust, fault‑tolerant systems that run in real time on vehicles across GM’s large portfolio and at scale on data collection fleets and in the cloud. 

Why Join Us? 

• Own a critical safety lever: Sensor alignment directly impacts perception quality, localization accuracy, and ultimately the safety envelope of AV behavior. 

• Scale cutting‑edge robotics systems: Build and evolve calibration and state estimation systems that run across large fleets, diverse platforms, and billions of miles of real‑world and simulated data. 

• Shape AV autonomy capabilities: Partner with leading experts in state estimation, mapping, perception, and planning to define the next generation of onboard and offboard autonomy systems for L2, L3, and L4 applications. 

• Lead a high‑impact, collaborative team: Work with a talented group of robotics, software, and systems engineers who care deeply about engineering rigor, safety, and shipping production systems. 

What You’ll Do:

• Lead and grow the Sensor Alignment team: Manage an interdisciplinary group of senior engineers and technical leads responsible for state estimation and sensor calibration systems. 

• Set and drive technical vision: Define the long‑term architecture and roadmap for onboard and offboard calibration, state estimation, and alignment infrastructure, in partnership with senior technical leaders across Embodied AI. 

• Define project roadmaps and milestones for calibration, localization, and alignment capabilities. 

• Prioritize initiatives that improve robustness, scalability, and safety‑critical performance across vehicle platforms and environments. 

• Establish and enforce best practices for C++/Python development, testing, validation, and deployment in safety‑critical systems. 

• Provide regular technical feedback, coaching, and mentorship to direct and indirect reports. 

• Guide the design, implementation, and deployment of real‑time onboard calibration as well as offline and cloud‑based calibration pipelines. 

• Ensure solutions are scalable, maintainable, and deeply observability‑driven, with clear metrics for performance and health. 

• Foster exploration of new approaches to multi‑sensor self‑calibration, joint estimation of extrinsics/intrinsics, and robust fault detection/handling strategies. 

• Encourage experimentation balanced with disciplined validation and safety considerations. 

• Partner with perception, prediction, planning, mapping, hardware, and operations teams to ensure sensor alignment systems integrate seamlessly and meet product needs. 

• Align with safety, validation, and operations teams on requirements, test strategies, and rollout plans. 

• Promote a collaborative, inclusive, and high‑performance culture aligned with GM’s engineering values. 

• Help define processes for incident response, root‑cause analysis, and continuous improvement related to calibration and alignment issues. 

• BS, MS, or PhD in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical/Mechanical Engineering, or a related technical field. 

• Proven experience managing and scaling high‑performing engineering teams in robotics, autonomy, or related domains. 

• Demonstrated ability to inspire and motivate teams, drive best practices, and deliver continuous improvement in both technical execution and team health. 

• Strong background in sensor calibration, state estimation, and/or localization (e.g., multi‑sensor fusion, SLAM, extrinsic/intrinsic calibration, pose graph optimization). 

• Solid software engineering proficiency in C++ and Python, including experience with large codebases, performance optimization, and robust testing. 

• Experience delivering production‑grade software systems in real‑time, safety‑critical or near safety‑critical environments. 

• Demonstrated ability to balance long‑term architectural investments with near‑term feature delivery. 

• History of establishing metrics, monitoring, and alerting for complex systems, and driving incident response and root‑cause analysis processes. 

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to translate between technical and non‑technical stakeholders. 

• Strong collaboration and influencing skills across organizations, including product, safety, validation, and hardware teams. 

Bonus Points: 

• Experience in Autonomous Vehicles (AV) or ADAS systems, especially in perception, localization, mapping, or motion planning. 

• Hands‑on experience with multi‑sensor calibration stacks (e.g., camera–lidar, camera–radar, lidar–IMU) and large‑scale deployment across fleets. 

• Background in probabilistic robotics, estimation/filtering (e.g., EKF/UKF, factor graphs), or optimization‑based calibration and SLAM. 

• Experience developing or working with safety‑critical software following rigorous validation, verification, and compliance processes. 

• Familiarity with simulation and synthetic data for calibration, alignment, and validation workflows. 

• Experience collaborating with or leading teams that build mapping, localization, or high‑definition map creation pipelines at scale. 

Remote:  This role is based remotely but if you live within a 50-mile radius of Austin, Detroit, Warren, Milford or Mountain View, you are expected to report to that location three times per week, at minimum. 

Compensation : 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 the California Bay Area. 

• The salary range for this role is $218,800.00 to $335,300.00. 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:  

• 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. 

This job may be eligible for relocation benefits. 

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. Note: program participants are required to purchase/lease a qualifying GM vehicle every four years unless one of a limited number of exceptions applies.

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