Staff Software Engineer, Autonomous Agent Platform

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

Job summary

Rivian Autonomy is building an Applied General AI team to make AI a dependable part of how hundreds of engineers develop, test, and ship software.

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own and evolve the agent platform behind that effort, spanning code generation and review, debugging, CI triage, operational support, and knowledge retrieval across our cloud, data, simulation, and vehicle‑software ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of software engineering experience in backend or distributed-systems.
• Staff-level technical leadership shaping strategy across teams.
• Hands-on experience building and operating LLM applications and agent systems.
• Demonstrated rigor in evaluating ML/LLM systems with metrics/experiments.
• Understanding of cost, latency, quality, and reliability tradeoffs in agent-systems.
• Strong Python skills and experience with Go/Rust/C++/TypeScript.
• Strong communication and developer empathy; capable of building trusted platforms.
• Self-directed in ambiguous problem spaces and driving scope.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build the core runtime for autonomous agents operating on Rivian systems, including orchestration, isolated execution, tool/skill frameworks, durable state, model routing, and audit trails.
• Establish execution and permission models with isolated workspaces and human-in-the-loop gates.
• Deliver lifecycle capabilities including code generation, debugging, CI attribution, documentation, and knowledge retrieval integrated with Slack, GitLab, Kubernetes, AWS, and Databricks.
• Own platform reliability and lifecycle of long-running agent work, including recovery and resource controls.
• Instrument workflows to capture traces, tests, diffs, and outcomes; build evaluation sets and calibrate model-based grading.
• Define metrics, detect regressions, and measure changes in engineering effort and developer experience.
• Drive controlled rollouts to evaluate prompts, context, tools, models, and budgets; lead architecture across boundaries.
• Lead architecture, communicate with engineering leadership, and mentor engineers on the platform.

Skills

Software engineering

LLM applications

Python

Go/Rust/C++/TS

Leadership

Communication

Self-direction

Agent systems

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

GitLab

Databricks

Job description

Rivian Autonomy is building an Applied General AI team to make AI a dependable part of how hundreds of engineers develop, test, and ship software.

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to own and evolve the agent platform behind that effort, spanning code generation and review, debugging, CI triage, operational support, and knowledge retrieval across our cloud, data, simulation, and vehicle‑software ecosystem.