Staff ML Data Platform Engineer

Rivian; Palo Alto (CA); On-site; USD 207,000 - 258,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) Plan

Employee Stock Purchase Program

Insurance benefits (medical, dental, 9

Job summary

Rivian is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, ML Data Infrastructure to own how autonomy data is described, indexed and accessed. You will shape a unified metadata and query layer across fleet data, build batch/streaming pipelines, and drive migrations to a unified data lake with strong data quality discipline.

You’ll collaborate with AI Platform, Perception, Planning, Simulation teams and partner engineering groups to enable scalable analytics and model training on multimodal drive data from

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS, EE or related field; equivalent experience accepted.
• 8+ years in software engineering with data infrastructure focus.
• 5+ years owning a large-scale data platform for ML/analytics workloads.
• 5+ years with columnar/analytic stores and data modeling for high cardinality data.
• 3+ years with Python; production Go/C++/Rust experience for performance layers.
• 3+ years with queueing systems (SQS, Kafka, Kinesis) in production ingest paths.
• 2+ years monitoring data pipelines and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog).

Responsibilities

• Own unified data layer for autonomy with real‑time search and metadata APIs.
• Design datalake architecture, metadata access, and API surface.
• Define canonical schemas; evolve data models and migration paths.
• Build batch and streaming pipelines for eval data and metrics.
• Create indexing and discovery for fast semantic search across fleet data.
• Improve data mining tools to find rare scenarios at fleet scale.
• Develop well‑documented APIs and tooling for engineers to access data.
• Ensure data correctness: contracts, freshness, completeness, and alerts.

Skills

8+ years software engineering

5+ years owning data platform

5+ years with analytic stores

3+ years Python

3+ years Go/C++/Rust

3+ years with queues/events (SQS/Kafka

3+ years batch/streaming pipelines

engineering leadership

schema design & data modeling

data quality gates & testing

ability to turn ambiguous requirements

cloud data tooling & monitoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or related field

Tools

ClickHouse

Pinot

Druid

BigQuery

Databricks

Snowflake

Parquet

Arrow

Iceberg

Delta

Job description

Rivian is seeking a Staff Software Engineer, ML Data Infrastructure to own how autonomy data is described, indexed and accessed. You will shape a unified metadata and query layer across fleet data, build batch/streaming pipelines, and drive migrations to a unified data lake with strong data quality discipline.

You’ll collaborate with AI Platform, Perception, Planning, Simulation teams and partner engineering groups to enable scalable analytics and model training on multimodal drive data from