Sr. Software/Data Engineer, Autonomy (AWS/Databricks)

About Rivian

Rivian is on a mission to keep the world adventurous forever. This goes for the emissions‑free Electric Adventure Vehicles we build, and the curious, courageous souls we seek to attract. As a company, we constantly challenge what’s possible, never simply accepting what has always been done. We reframe old problems, seek new solutions and operate comfortably in areas that are unknown. Our backgrounds are diverse, but our team shares a love of the outdoors and a desire to protect it for future generations.

Role Summary

We’re hiring a high‑impact Senior Software/Data Engineer to join our Autonomy Data, Tools and ML Infra Team. Your main focus will be to build and scale our analytics data platform and pipelines using AWS and Databricks. Our data platform processes petabytes of telemetry data from the vehicle fleet, enabling the Autonomy team to triage issues, calculate metrics and perform analysis. We are expanding the team because our data volumes will grow rapidly as we produce more vehicles and launch more sophisticated autonomy features. Your insights and improvements will be instrumental in providing accurate and up‑to‑date data for all our analysis and evaluation activities. Your work will directly influence the development of our software for millions of miles of real‑world driving.

Responsibilities

• Develop and scale our data analytics pipelines in AWS and Databricks to handle data from our growing vehicle fleet and our vehicle simulation.
• Establish and operationalize performance monitoring systems for our data pipelines.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to refine SLAs as the monitoring matures.
• Proactively design and deliver impactful architectural improvements to ensure the platform’s long‑term stability.
• Design and implement data governance mechanisms that enable us to balance secure and wider collaboration with an uncompromised development process.
• Contribute to the continuous development of tooling (e.g., Cursor and MCP servers) to increase developer velocity and integrate with Rivian systems.
• Collaborate closely with colleagues in our offices in California and Serbia, acting as a key technical liaison to gather requirements and drive improvements to the platform.
• Demonstrate strong organizational skills to manage multiple projects, meet deadlines, and deliver high‑quality results.
• Support the team’s on‑call rotation for any operationally critical systems.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software/data engineering experience, with a significant focus on data engineering or analytics.
• Experience designing, deploying, and maintaining systems using core AWS services (e.g., S3, EC2, Lambda) and understanding of cloud‑native architecture.
• Proficiency in building, testing, and optimizing production‑grade data pipelines in Databricks or Spark (PySpark/Scala) and SQL.
• Strong Python and SQL skills.
• Hands‑on experience developing dashboards for analysis and reporting, leveraging tools such as Databricks Workspaces, Streamlit or Jupyter notebooks.
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration tools (e.g. Apache Airflow) or data transformation frameworks (e.g. dbt) a plus.
• Familiarity with autonomous systems development (e.g., perception, planning, control) or relevant domains such as robotics, simulation, or verification/validation.
• Proven ability to debug and root‑cause issues systematically.

Equal Opportunity

Rivian is an equal‑opportunity employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local fair employment practices laws. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information or characteristics, physical or mental disability, marital/domestic partner status, age, military/veteran status, medical condition, or any other characteristic protected by law. Rivian is committed to ensuring that our hiring process is accessible for persons with disabilities.