Senior Software Engineer, Autonomy Evaluation & Metrics Platform

About Rivian

Rivian is on a mission to keep the world adventurous forever. This goes for the emissions-free Electric Adventure Vehicles we build, and the curious, courageous souls we seek to attract.

As a company, we constantly challenge what’s possible, never simply accepting what has always been done. We reframe old problems, seek new solutions and operate comfortably in areas that are unknown. Our backgrounds are diverse, but our team shares a love of the outdoors and a desire to protect it for future generations.

Role Summary

Rivian’s Autonomy Eval Infrastructure team builds the software that helps engineers understand

and improve the ML models behind our driving systems and gives release teams evidence they

can trust. Within Autonomy’s AI Platform organization, we connect model development with

evaluation workflows, metrics, triage and visualization across simulation and real-world vehicle

data.

As a senior metrics-platform engineer, you will design, build and operate a substantial part of

the platform that makes autonomy evaluation consistent and reproducible. Working directly with

Perception, Planning and Systems engineers, you will connect model experiments to reliable

metrics and help turn insights about model behavior, failure modes and generalization into

improvements in models and data.

This is a hands-on software engineering role. You will own projects through design,

implementation, rollout and operation, make practical system-design trade-offs, and mentor

teammates. As an early member of a newly formed team, you will help establish the engineering

practices and interfaces that make the platform useful across Autonomy.

Responsibilities

• Own the design and delivery of a metrics-platform area, such as the metric registry,

computation services or comparison and reporting APIs, in partnership with the team’s

technical lead.

• Design versioned metric definitions and data models for inputs, aggregation, slicing and

results. Preserve provenance linking official evaluation runs to code, model, dataset and

scenario versions.

• Build distributed computation and storage paths with idempotent execution, incremental

processing and controlled backfills. Make informed trade-offs across throughput, latency,

cost and reproducibility.

• Build comparison tools that expose coverage, sample sizes, uncertainty and changes in

evaluation inputs. Help users distinguish model regressions from data, simulator or

infrastructure failures.

• Partner with model developers to design evaluation experiments, inspect predictions and

analyze failure patterns. Use the findings to guide model and data improvements, and

build reusable evaluation harnesses that shorten the iteration cycle.

• Integrate metrics and regression checks into replay and closed-loop evaluation

workflows and CI. Partner with domain owners on metric semantics and thresholds, and

with Systems on evidence for release decisions.

• Deliver self-service APIs and scorecards backed by consistent definitions and results.

Migrate existing consumers incrementally while preserving reporting continuity and

traceability.

• Own reliability and performance for your services through testing, observability, incident

investigation and operational documentation; measure improvements in turnaround time,

correctness and cost.

• Write and review production code, lead design reviews for your projects, mentor

engineers, and collaborate across Palo Alto, London and Belgrade to deliver software

that users adopt.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated

experience and impact, including ownership of production backend or data-intensive

systems.

• Hands-on experience building software for autonomy or robotics, with direct exposure to

evaluation, simulation, perception, planning or validation workflows.

• Strong Python programming skills, with the ability to write, test, profile and debug

maintainable production software.

• Practical SQL skills, with AI coding tools expected to support writing and refining

queries; ability to validate query logic, results and performance.

• Demonstrated system-design ability across service APIs, data modeling, distributed

processing and storage, including failure recovery, consistency and performance

trade-offs.

• Experience taking a project from requirements and design through implementation,

rollout and operation, coordinating dependencies and communicating trade-offs clearly.

• Practical understanding of model inference and evaluation, including held-out datasets,

generalization, reproducibility and model versioning, and the differences between

open-loop replay, closed-loop simulation and real-world measurements.

• Ability to reason about sampling, confidence intervals, noisy metrics and valid

comparisons, and to work with domain experts when stronger statistical analysis is

needed.

• Experience with cloud infrastructure, containers, CI/CD and production observability,

plus a track record of constructive code review and mentoring.

Bonus Points

• Experience building metric registries, evaluation services, experiment-tracking systems

or automated regression gates used by multiple engineering teams.

• Experience with Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake or comparable distributed data systems,

and with AWS, Docker or GitLab CI.

• Experience migrating analytical or reporting systems without breaking downstream

consumers, or linking metrics to scenario-level debugging and triage.

• Experience with PyTorch or similar ML frameworks, evaluation of end-to-end driving

models, or connecting offline model metrics to closed-loop and real-world driving

behavior.

Pay Disclosure

Salary Range for California Based Applicants: $179,000-$223,800 (actual compensation will be determined based on experience, location, and other factors permitted by law).

Benefits Summary: Rivian provides robust medical/Rx, dental and vision insurance packages for full-time employees, their spouse or domestic partner, and children up to age 26. Coverage is effective on the first day of employment, and Rivian covers most of the premiums.

Equal Opportunity

Rivian is an equal opportunity employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local fair employment practices laws. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information or characteristics, physical or mental disability, marital/domestic partner status, age, military/veteran status, medical condition, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Rivian is committed to ensuring that our hiring process is accessible for persons with disabilities. If you have a disability or limitation, such as those covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, that requires accommodations to assist you in the search and application process, please email us at candidateaccommodations@rivian.com.

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