Lead Systems Engineer

The Role

GM Defense delivers integrated vehicles, power and propulsion, and autonomy and connectivity solutions for global defense, security, and government customers. By leveraging GM’s advanced commercial vehicle platforms, engineering expertise, and large-scale manufacturing, GM Defense rapidly adapts proven technologies into military-grade, mission-ready solutions that help customers improve mobility, readiness, and sustainment while managing cost and complexity.

GM Defense delivers integrated vehicles, power and propulsion, and autonomy and connectivity solutions for global defense, security, and government customers. By leveraging GM’s advanced commercial vehicle platforms, engineering expertise, and large-scale manufacturing, GM Defense rapidly adapts proven technologies into military-grade, mission-ready solutions that help customers improve mobility, readiness, and sustainment while managing cost and complexity.

System engineering is a multidisciplinary organization chartered with pulling together the highly complex and interconnected system that is the modern-day vehicle and related products. It transcends the physical nature of any specific design, cutting across traditional engineering disciplines to enable customer-focused execution of vehicle-level features.

The Lead System Engineer is a people leader and technical expert role responsible for leading Systems Engineers in the definition and roll-down of system requirements, alignment of subsystem interfaces, and execution of verification planning to ensure the total product meets mission and program objectives. In this role, the Lead System Engineer provides system-level technical leadership across the product, integrating engineering inputs into a cohesive requirements-driven solution while ensuring safety, performance, timing, cost, and manufacturability targets are supported.

Requirements and engineering inputs for this role may come directly from the customer as well as indirectly through the GMD business development team. AI-enabled tools are expected to be used in the development, refinement, and management of requirements, and the role is responsible for building team capability through required AI training and adoption of effective engineering practices.

• Lead a team of Systems Engineers in development, decomposition, and roll-down of system requirements across the product
• Ensure subsystem requirements, interfaces, and verification plans are aligned to overall mission and program objectives
• Drive system-level integration across engineering disciplines to deliver a cohesive and executable product definition
• Lead cross-functional collaboration to ensure requirements support safety, performance, cost, timing, manufacturability, and validation objectives
• Oversee interface definition, requirements traceability, and verification planning across systems and subsystems
• Create System DFMEA and ensure system failure modes are understood, documented, and addressed through the design process
• Participate in Fault Tree Analysis and support development of the technical understanding needed to identify risk drivers and mitigation paths
• Collaborate on the V&V plan across mechanical, electrical, and controls domains to ensure the system is validated against requirements and intended performance
• Lead the integration and issue resolution of the system through the full development cycle
• Work with subsystem and component teams to optimize system design and improve total system performance
• Set availability targets, allocate them to subsystems and components, determine feature sensitivity to variation and failure modes, and define mitigation plans to improve performance to target
• Stay abreast of new technology, new…