Staff Software Engineer, Vehicle Configuration Platform

About the role

The vehicle configuration platform team is responsible for a schema-driven system that defines and provisions configurable attributes for vehicle firmware across Rivian and Volkswagen brands. As a technical leader, you will own the health, reliability, and scalability of the compilation, validation, and release infrastructure. You will set technical direction and drive initiatives across firmware, build infrastructure, and factory integration to ensure the platform remains robust and efficient.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for configuration tooling, validation, and delivery infrastructure, translating platform architecture into a concrete, sequenced roadmap and driving it to completion across teams.
• Lead initiatives that simplify the platform: consolidating redundant mechanisms, retiring legacy pathways, and reducing the coordination cost of routine changes, while every downstream consumer keeps working.
• Design the compatibility strategy for data contracts deployed to devices in the field, and build the automated enforcement that makes schema evolution provably safe rather than carefully reviewed.
• Architect the validation and release pipeline as a product: define what classes of defects must be impossible to merge, and build the layered checks, staged rollouts, and observability that get there.
• Serve as the senior escalation point for production configuration issues, leading root cause analysis during launches and field events and converting each incident into systemic prevention.
• Drive alignment across organizational boundaries, negotiating shared contracts, review processes, and release mechanics with firmware, cloud, diagnostics, manufacturing, and partner-brand stakeholders who have differing constraints and conventions.
• Mentor and multiply the engineers on the team, setting standards through design review, raising the quality of technical writing and decision records, and growing the mid-level engineers toward ownership.

Required skills

• Software engineering
• Protocol Buffers
• Python
• C
• Bazel
• CI/CD
• Release engineering

Nice to have

• UDS diagnostics
• Vehicle variant coding
• Factory provisioning
• OTA update systems
• Rust
• Code generation toolchains
• Manifest-based multi-repository workflows

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including demonstrated ownership of a platform, infrastructure, or developer-facing system used by many teams.
• A track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives from proposal through delivery.

Benefits

• Health coverage
• Retirement savings
• Time off
• Family planning programs

About the Company

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies is a joint venture between two industry leaders focused on automotive software-defined vehicles. They work on operating systems, zonal controllers, and cloud and connectivity solutions to address the challenges of electric vehicles.