Data & Validation Tools Lead — AI-Driven Automation

Rivian; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 186,000 - 233,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) plan

Employee stock options / equity awards

Paid vacation and sick leave

Life and disability insurance

Job summary

Rivian seeks a leader to guide a small, agile team that builds the data acquisition, post-processing, analytics, and dashboarding tools used by validation engineers. You will steer a six-person team, influence roadmap decisions, and ensure the seamless integration of AI-powered tools into test infrastructure and data pipelines.

You will drive automation, present clear metrics, and collaborate with autonomy infrastructure to remove pain points in validation workflows while delivering defensible

Qualifications

• 5+ years in software engineering with a record of managing people and delivering cross-functional projects with a B.S. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Robotics or related technical field.
• Strong hands-on Python experience building data tooling, pipelines, or analytics platforms for engineering or test organizations and demonstrated CI/CD and automated test framework experience (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or Jenkins, Docker, Pytest) in modern cloud services (AWS preferred).
• Practical experience with vehicle or robotics data: CAN (DBC, UDS / ISO 14229), automotive Ethernet, camera/radar/lidar logs, time synchronization, and formats such as MCAP, ROS, or MDF/MF4.
• Practical experience with LLMs and applied AI, including involvement with agent or automation systems and holding them to measurable accuracy metrics.
• Collaborative leader and clear communicator: Explain complex ideas simply, surface risks early, secure buy-in from stakeholders, develop meaningful dashboards and build a positive team culture.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team: Lead, coach and grow a team of six engineers, define the roadmap and prioritize the team’s workflow against limited capacity, stay hands on and drive cross-functional technical alignment and process improvements.
• Own the charter: Data acquisition, post-processing, analytics, data tools test automation, fleet software integration, and in-house data loggers where production logging falls short.
• Partner before building: Serve as the primary interface to the larger Autonomy software, platform, and infrastructure organizations. Extend what they already own, and build only the thin, high-leverage layer closest to the validation engineer whenever possible versus building from scratch.
• Develop dashboards: Automated reporting for active safety and automated driving feature test results, regulatory scoring, vehicle operator safety and behavior metrics and increase throughput on release metrics and validation KPIs.
• Lead CI/CD and quality: Run the pipelines and automated test framework for the team's repositories, report release health and stability, hold the quality gates and metric traceability that make results defensible and demonstrate the team is accelerating validation.
• Apply AI to the workflow: Identify and deploy AI tools and agents for test data and log triage, prioritize critical validation scenarios, report drafting, and implement new targeted evaluation methodologies, with judgment about where agentic automation fits and when other methods are better suited.

Skills

Python

CI/CD

LLMs / AI

Education

B.S. in CS/CE/EE/Robotics

Tools

GitHub Actions

GitLab CI

Jenkins

Docker

Pytest

AWS

ROS / MCAP

Job description

Rivian seeks a leader to guide a small, agile team that builds the data acquisition, post-processing, analytics, and dashboarding tools used by validation engineers. You will steer a six-person team, influence roadmap decisions, and ensure the seamless integration of AI-powered tools into test infrastructure and data pipelines.

You will drive automation, present clear metrics, and collaborate with autonomy infrastructure to remove pain points in validation workflows while delivering defensible