Senior Vehicle Systems Architect & AI-Driven Design

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies; Irvine (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies seeks a Vehicle System Architect to own mechatronic architecture and translate product intent into vehicle-level models and analyses. You will drive parametric modeling, cost and BOM studies, and integrated AI workflows across architecture data.

You will build pipelines for extracting device data, conducting trade studies, and supporting cross-domain reviews with a focus on cost, weight and reliability.

Qualifications

• BS/MS in Electrical, Computer, Mechanical, Systems or Aerospace Engineering, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
• 5+ years in vehicle, aerospace or electromechanical systems engineering — or an equivalent record of building the analyses that decided real designs.
• Strong Python — data processing, parametric modeling, automation, prototyping AI workflows.
• Practical experience building LLM applications: RAG pipelines, semantic search, structured extraction or agent frameworks.
• Systems-minded: decompose a vehicle into subsystems, functions and interfaces, and reason about propagation of changes.
• Comfortable with numbers that carry consequences — cost, mass, power budgets — and with defending them.

Responsibilities

• Build and own parametric models behind vehicle architecture decisions: controller count, placement, functional allocation across ECUs, harness topology.
• Run architecture trade studies with quantified outcomes — cost, mass, harness complexity, power, temperature, reliability, manufacturability.
• Build the cost and BOM models that turn architecture options into numbers.
• Support cost-down by subtraction: identify controllers, harness runs and sensors that can be removed.
• Analyze new technology integration with SW/HW platform design approach.
• Build LLM pipelines over architecture artifacts to extract data and surface gaps across requirements and interfaces.

Skills

Python

LLM pipelines

Systems thinking

Automation

AI workflows

Data processing

Education

BS/MS in Electrical, Computer, Mechanical, Systems or Aerospace Engineering

Tools

GitLab

OpenModelica

Julia

Spice

Modelica

DBC/ARXML

Job description

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies seeks a Vehicle System Architect to own mechatronic architecture and translate product intent into vehicle-level models and analyses. You will drive parametric modeling, cost and BOM studies, and integrated AI workflows across architecture data.

You will build pipelines for extracting device data, conducting trade studies, and supporting cross-domain reviews with a focus on cost, weight and reliability.