Senior Software Engineer, Motion Planning & Data Pipelines

Rivian; Palo Alto, Irvine (CA, CA); On-site; USD 165,000 - 206,000; Full time

Job summary

Rivian seeks Senior Software Engineers to lead data pipelines for the Large Driving Model (LDM) and own data curation strategies that fuel the models. You will surface high-value examples, refine evaluation benchmarks, and work directly with modeling teams to accelerate performance.

If you are strong in Python, experienced with autonomous systems data, and comfortable navigating complex data challenges independently, we want to hear from you.

Qualifications

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Data Science, Robotics, Engineering, or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience as a Software Engineer, Data Analytics Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer, or Motion Planning Engineer.
• Advanced proficiency in Python and SQL is required, with a proven track record of building production-grade data products.
• Hands-on experience with distributed data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Ray) and cloud infrastructure.
• Solid understanding of data-centric AI, dataset curation strategies, and model evaluation methodologies.
• Experience handling large-scale sensor data or complex robotics telemetry.
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously, taking projects from a vague concept to a verified, high performing product.
• Strong ability to communicate technical trade-offs and collaborate effectively within a fast-paced team environment.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain scalable data mining pipelines to extract rare and critical driving scenarios from massive fleet datasets.
• Lead the curation and analysis of large-scale training sets to improve the robustness and generalization of the LDM.
• Design and implement rigorous evaluation frameworks to measure model performance against real-world baselines.
• Provide technical guidance and code reviews for junior and mid-level engineers, ensuring high standards for code quality and system design.
• Partner closely with modeling engineers to define data requirements and iterate on rapid experimental loops.
• Identify trends, anomalies, and data distribution shifts that impact model training and validation.
• Contribute to the design of data infrastructure, making informed decisions on tradeoffs between data quality, scale, and compute efficiency.
• Transition experimental data strategies

Skills

Python

SQL

Distributed data processing

Cloud infrastructure

Data-centric AI

Sensor data handling

Education

B.S./M.S. in Computer Science, Data Science, Robotics, Engineering

Tools

Spark

Ray

Job description

Rivian seeks Senior Software Engineers to lead data pipelines for the Large Driving Model (LDM) and own data curation strategies that fuel the models. You will surface high-value examples, refine evaluation benchmarks, and work directly with modeling teams to accelerate performance.

If you are strong in Python, experienced with autonomous systems data, and comfortable navigating complex data challenges independently, we want to hear from you.