Backend Engineer Java Jobs in Rochester, MI (NOW HIRING)

Job Description

The Role:

The GM Energy Cloud Platform (GMEC) and its data ecosystem support home energy management, bidirectional charging (V2H/V2G), and utility programs across thousands of homes and vehicles. Our services power customer experiences, utility integrations, and measurement & verification (M&V) for GM Energy's products.

We are investing in senior engineering talent to strengthen our backend application services, integrations, and reliability, while continuing to mature our data foundations, in line with GM's corporate goals around software reliability, uptime, and operational excellence.

We are looking for a Senior Software Engineer (Level 7A) to lead backend and platform services for the GM Energy Cloud platform.

You will:

Design and build scalable, reliable backend services and APIs that power home energy, EV/EVSE telemetry, and utility/aggregator experiences.

Own critical production services and integrations, ensuring they are secure, observable, and easy to operate.

Help the team meet GM's system reliability objectives - including uptime, incident reduction, and robust monitoring.

This is a senior individual contributor (IC) role. You will be expected to operate with minimal direction, lead complex technical work across teams, and mentor other engineers while remaining hands-on.

What You'll Do:

• Backend & Platform Engineering (Primary Focus)

• Lead end-to-end design and implementation of complex backend features and cross-service flows with minimal guidance.

• Design, build, and operate backend services and RESTful APIs (for example in Python, Java, or similar) that:

  • Surface energy and telemetry data to mobile/web apps and partner systems.

  • Partner with data engineering and analytics teams to ensure services integrate cleanly with data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, or similar) and expose data in a way that supports reporting, and analytics.

  • Contribute to or advise on key data models and pipelines related to Energy Cloud services (telemetry, enrollments, program performance), including data quality, freshness, and observability where it directly impacts service correctness and customer outcomes.

  • Implement and evolve service contracts and data exchange patterns:

  • Define clear, versioned APIs and schemas for downstream consumers and upstream producers.

  • Ensure compatibility, backward-compatibility, and robust error handling across integrations.

  • Automated unit, integration, and contract tests for services.

  • Secure build and deployment pipelines with safe rollout strategies (blue/green, canary).

• Align your work to GM's software reliability and operational excellence goals:

  • Participate in on-call for Energy Cloud services:

  • Lead or support triage, mitigation, and root-cause analysis for incidents.

  • Drive permanent improvements, automation, and follow-up tasks from post-incident reviews.

  • Ensure that new services and significant changes meet GM's production readiness expectations:

  • Comprehensive testing, health checks, runbooks, rollback strategies, and observability in place before launch.

  • Leadership & Collaboration (Level 7A Expectations)

  • Mentor other engineers

  • Operational readiness, monitoring, and incident response best practices.

  • Influence technical direction across teams by:

  • Establishing and promoting best practices for APIs, integration patterns, security, and observability.

  • Collaborating with product, SRE, data, and platform teams to sequence work that delivers value while improving reliability and operability.

Your Skills & Abilities (Required Qualifications):

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 6+ years of relevant experience in backend software engineering, including:

• Designing, building, and operating production services and APIs on a major cloud provider (Azure, GCP, or AWS), with a strong preference for Azure.

• Strong hands-on skills in:

  • At least one general-purpose programming language (e.g., Python, Java, or similar) used for backend services.

  • RESTful API design and implementation, including authentication/authorization, versioning, and error handling.

• Proven experience with:

  • Distributed systems or microservices architectures in production.

  • CI/CD practices and automated testing (unit, integration, contract) for application code.

  • Monitoring, logging, and alerting using modern observability tools (e.g., Datadog, Prometheus/Grafana, or equivalent).

  • Demonstrated track record owning or co-owning production operations:

  • On-call participation, incident diagnosis, and permanent fixes.

• Working with SRE/platform teams to improve reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency.

What Will Give You A Competitive Edge (Preferred Qualifications):

• Experience in energy, utilities, EV charging, home energy systems, or large-scale IoT.

• Additional experience with data and eventing, such as:

• Event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, Event Hubs) and streaming data pipelines.

• Working with modern data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, or equivalent) and writing performant SQL for operational use cases.

• Experience with:

  • Security and compliance for services and data (access controls, secrets management, PII handling).

  • SRE and reliability practices: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, production readiness reviews, and post-incident analysis.

  • Demonstrated ability to:

  • Mentor other engineers and elevate engineering standards across teams.

  • Influence architecture and technical direction across a platform or domain.

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