Staff AI Engineer, Commercial Technology

Rivian is seeking an entrepreneurial, hands-on senior contributor to build and scale our AI solutions driving impact across Commercial Technology teams. As a Staff AI Engineer, you will design, build, and operate production-grade systems at the forefront of generative AI, partnering with leaders across the company to unlock transformative business value. You will set technical direction, build complex agentic solutions, and raise the engineering bar through architectural leadership, operational excellence, and pragmatic innovation with language models and machine learning. This position will be located in Palo Alto, CA and report to our Director of Engineering.

• Lead the technical design and hands-on development of prioritized AI applications, services, and platforms leveraging state-of-the-art LLM app stacks, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation frameworks, and scalable serving.

• Build a holistic view of AI investments by collaborating with engineering groups implementing AI in their domains, aligning patterns, reusing components, and avoiding duplication.

• Drive continuous improvement in AI methodologies and best practices; evaluate emerging capabilities and land them as secure, production-grade systems.

• Champion AI literacy, enablement, and adoption through demos, guidance, and technical leadership across the org.

• Establish rigorous evaluation, guardrails, and monitoring practices; instrument offline and online metrics & telemetry to ensure quality, safety, and SLOs; improve performance based on data.

• Optimize latency, throughput, and cost at scale; guide make/buy decisions and vendor integrations where appropriate.

• BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.

• Practical software engineering experience building backend services, APIs, or data-intensive applications; strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, and systems.

• Exposure to or hands-on experience with LLM application concepts such as retrieval, grounding, prompt/agent design, function/tool use, evaluation, safety/guardrails, and cost/latency optimization.

• Proficiency with modern software delivery practices (version control, CI/CD, testing, observability); familiarity with cloud-native services and containerization.

• Ability to collaborate with product and business partners; strong written and verbal communication skills.

• Bias to ship, learn, and iterate; comfortable working in fast-evolving technology areas with incomplete information.

• Demonstrated ownership of services or platform components, end-to-end delivery of cross-service initiatives, and contributions to reliability/SLOs and operational excellence.

• Strong proficiency with AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, IAM, ECS/EKS).

• Deep understanding of database and storage paradigms (SQL, NoSQL, search engines).

• Proficiency in one or more programming languages: Python, Typescript, Java, Go, C++, or Rust.

• Proven ability to define platform-wide architecture standards and drive DevOps practices in a data-focused environment.

Preferred

• Deep technical knowledge in AI/ML, with hands-on experience building and deploying solutions using language models, retrieval/grounding, embeddings/vector search, and evaluation.
• Strong familiarity with security, privacy, compliance, safety, and auditability for enterprise AI systems.