5 days ago
Base Salary
$207k - $258k/yr
Responsibilities
- Define and own the agent platform architecture, including orchestration of long-running multi-step agents, persistent state, tool integration, permission-aware enterprise data access, and evaluation infrastructure.
- Establish reusable patterns, interfaces, and engineering standards that can be adopted across the organization.
- Set reliability, observability, evaluation, quality, latency, and cost standards for production AI systems.
- Lead the design and implementation of complex components, deliver reference implementations, and resolve critical integration and reliability challenges.
- Evaluate emerging models, frameworks, and tools; lead build-versus-buy and vendor decisions; and translate advances into a measurable technical roadmap.
- Embed authorization, auditability, and data governance into the platform and applications in partnership with Security, Legal, and Compliance.
- Mentor engineers, conduct design and code reviews, raise engineering standards, and participate in hiring.
Requirements
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including technical leadership of complex production systems.
- Experience shipping and operating LLM-based or agentic applications with real users in production and demonstrating measured quality, adoption, and business impact.
- Deep understanding of agent-system design, including orchestration, tool calling, retrieval and grounding, context and memory management, durable execution, verification, and evaluation of nondeterministic systems.
- Expertise in backend and distributed systems, including APIs, asynchronous execution, state management, fault tolerance, and observability at scale.
- Expert-level Python experience and experience deploying containerized services on cloud infrastructure with automated delivery pipelines.
- Record of setting technical direction and engineering practices adopted beyond one’s own team, with demonstrable impact on dependent systems and engineers.
- Experience integrating enterprise systems and data under security, privacy, and permission constraints.
- Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Preferred: experience with multi-agent systems involving verification or adversarial checking, persistent state, recovery, or human approval.
- Preferred: experience with multimodal applications, document or engineering-drawing understanding, vision models, or computer-use agents.
- Preferred: familiarity with CAD, PLM, simulation, CAE, or physics-informed machine learning.
- Preferred: experience improving AI systems through failure analysis, feedback loops, model adaptation, or fine-tuning.
- Preferred: experience building AI infrastructure adopted by multiple teams or forward-deployed experience at an AI lab or agent-infrastructure company.
Benefits
- Role is located in Palo Alto, California.
- Comprehensive benefits are available for full-time and part-time employees and eligible dependents, including paid vacation, paid sick leave, life insurance, medical, dental, vision, and short- and long-term disability insurance.
- Eligible employees may participate in Rivian’s 401(k) Plan and Employee Stock Purchase Program.
- Full-time employee coverage is effective on the first day of employment; part-time employee coverage begins the first of the month following 90 days of employment.
- The posting is not expected to close before December 30, 2026.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Rivian
Rivian designs and manufactures electric vehicles, including the R1T pickup, R1S SUV, and commercial delivery vans, selling directly to consumers and fleet operators. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Irvine, California, it operates a manufacturing plant in Normal, Illinois, and is publicly traded on NASDAQ. The company also develops in-vehicle software and electrical architecture and offers charging and service support for its owners.