Senior Autonomous Vehicle Data Architect

Rivian Automotive; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 199,000 - 331,000; Full time

Job summary

Rivian Automotive in California seeks an expert AV data strategist to architect the data engine and collection frameworks powering our next‑generation perception and autonomous driving models. You will design system‑level strategies to identify, capture, and use fleet data for training and evaluation of diverse, high‑quality datasets.

You will work with autonomy ML, systems engineering, and vehicle operations to align data programs with privacy and safety constraints, while expanding coverage of

Qualifications

• Advanced degree (Master’s or Ph.D.) in Systems Engineering, CS, Robotics, ML, Data Science, or related field.
• 10+ years (Bachelor’s)/8+ years (Master’s) experience in systems engineering, data strategy, or MLOps in autonomy/robotics industry.
• Understanding of autonomy data requirements for perception models, end-to-end models, imitation learning, and sensor-to-trajectory model training lifecycles.
• Demonstrated ability to build technical frameworks from the ground up and drive consensus among teams such as ML software, data and cloud infrastructure and vehicle operations.
• Medium to strong programming skills in Python and one or more query languages (e.g., SQL, PL/SQL, DDL, MDX, HiveQL, SparkSQL, Scala).
• Knowledge of privacy engineering, data privacy, security risks, and controls
• Excellent team player with strong communication and presentation skills.

Responsibilities

• Define and document comprehensive data requirements to support diverse training, development and evaluation use cases across the autonomy stack.
• Build and manage a decision-making framework with cross-functional stakeholders. Use this framework to determine data availability, identify gaps between required vs. available data, and prioritize collection efforts of desired driving behaviors, trajectory profiles or scenes.
• Driven by the gap analysis, devise strategies to capture required data from the fleet. Ensure the data meets required recall, precision and diversity requirements while operating within the constraints of on-vehicle data logging, privacy, and upload bandwidth.
• Collaborate with Autonomy ML teams to systematically identify model failure modes and define requirements for targeted data mining campaigns to resolve them.
• Define strategies and standards for data slicing tailored to training, development and evaluation of autonomy perception, planning and end-to-end models. Coordinate the deployment of tagging with data and cloud teams.
• Curate diverse, high fidelity datasets that capture targeted ODD scenes and human driving demonstrations, systematically filtering out sub-optimal behaviors.
• Review and provide strategic inputs on perception taxonomy requirements—such as defining object and scene classifications, attributes etc.—to meet the demands of different autonomy features on the target vehicle platform or target customer market.
• Define system metrics to evaluate the health, diversity, and potential bias of driving datasets, ensuring they accurately represent our Operational Design Domain (ODD) and comply with safety and verification standards.

Skills

Systems Engineering

Data Strategy

MLOps

Python

SQL

Privacy Engineering

Communication

Education

Master’s or Ph.D. in relevant field

Job description

Rivian Automotive in California seeks an expert AV data strategist to architect the data engine and collection frameworks powering our next‑generation perception and autonomous driving models. You will design system‑level strategies to identify, capture, and use fleet data for training and evaluation of diverse, high‑quality datasets.

You will work with autonomy ML, systems engineering, and vehicle operations to align data programs with privacy and safety constraints, while expanding coverage of