Lead Data Scientist - Agentic AI & Cognitive Systems

Rivian; El Segundo (CA); On-site; USD 171,100 - 213,900; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) Plan

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Paid time off

Job summary

Rivian seeks a Staff/Lead Data Scientist focused on Agentic Solutions to design and operationalize cognitive architecture powering Rivian's AI agents. You will build reasoning loops, retrieval systems, and evaluation frameworks enabling agents to act on live business data with accuracy and reliability.

The role emphasizes orchestration frameworks, SLM adaptation, and token‑economy optimization, with a focus on reliable, scalable AI for enterprise use in a fast-growing environment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• Master’s or PhD preferred.

Responsibilities

• Design and program multi-step reasoning frameworks using LangChain, LlamaIndex, or Haystack.
• Architect advanced retrieval structures, experiment with embedding models, dynamic chunking strategies, and token management to ensure agents receive high‑fidelity business context.
• Proactive System Reasoning: Build internal logic and evaluation criteria for “Watchdog” agents, enabling them to analyze live operational data streams, infer anomalies, and generate proactive insights.
• Evaluate, select, and adapt small language models (e.g., Phi, Mistral, Gemma) for domain-specific tasks where precision, latency, and cost efficiency matter.
• Architect token-efficient design: context compression, prompt caching, dynamic context windowing, and minimizing calls for cost-effective scalability.
• Establish evaluation benchmarks to validate agent reasoning, track accuracy drift, and minimize hallucinations.

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related quantitative field

Master’s or PhD preferred

Tools

Databricks

Spark

Delta Lake

Job description

Rivian seeks a Staff/Lead Data Scientist focused on Agentic Solutions to design and operationalize cognitive architecture powering Rivian's AI agents. You will build reasoning loops, retrieval systems, and evaluation frameworks enabling agents to act on live business data with accuracy and reliability.

The role emphasizes orchestration frameworks, SLM adaptation, and token‑economy optimization, with a focus on reliable, scalable AI for enterprise use in a fast-growing environment.