Staff AI Engineer, Commercial Technology

Role Summary 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. Responsibilities 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. Qualifications 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. Salary Salary Range for this role is $206,500 - $258,100 for California based applicants. This is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, specific competencies, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, shift, and organizational needs. The successful candidate may be eligible for annual performance bonus and equity awards. Benefits We offer a comprehensive package of benefits for full‑time and part‑time employees, their spouse or domestic partner, and children up to age 26, including paid vacation, paid sick leave, life, medical, dental, vision, short‑term disability insurance, and long‑term disability insurance to eligible employees. You may also have the opportunity to participate in Rivian’s 401(k) Plan and Employee Stock Purchase Program if you meet certain eligibility requirements. Full‑time employee coverage is effective on their first day of employment. Part‑time employee coverage is effective the first of the month following 90 days of employment. More information about benefits is available at rivianbenefits.com. 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. If you have a disability or limitation, such as those covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, that requires accommodations to assist you in the search and application process, please email us at View email address on click.appcast.io. Candidate Data Privacy Rivian may collect, use and disclose your personal information or personal data (within the meaning of the applicable data protection laws) when you apply for employment and/or participate in our recruitment processes (“Candidate Personal Data”). This data includes contact, demographic, communications, educational, professional, employment, social media/website, network/device, recruiting system usage/interaction, security and preference information. Rivian may use your Candidate Personal Data for the purposes of (i) tracking interactions with our recruiting system; (ii) carrying out, analyzing and improving our application and recruitment process, including assessing you and your application and conducting employment, background and reference checks; (iii) establishing an employment relationship or entering into an employment contract with you; (iv) complying with our legal, regulatory and corporate governance obligations; (v) recordkeeping; (vi) ensuring network and information security and preventing fraud; and (vii) as otherwise required or permitted by applicable law. Rivian may share your Candidate Personal Data with (i) internal personnel who have a need to know such information in order to perform their duties, including individuals on our People Team, Finance, Legal, and the team(s) with the position(s) for which you are applying; (ii) Rivian affiliates; and (iii) Rivian’s service providers, including providers of background checks, staffing services, and cloud services. Rivian may transfer or store internationally your Candidate Personal Data, including to or in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union and in the cloud, and this data may be subject to the laws and accessible to the courts, law enforcement and national security authorities of such jurisdictions. Please note that we are currently not accepting applications from third party application services. #J-18808-Ljbffr Rivian