Senior Technical Program Manager, Field Quality & Reliability – New Programs

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

Field Quality & Reliability at Rivian ensures that every issue our customers experience in the field is captured, understood, escalated, root caused, contained, driven to permanent closure, and prevented for future production builds. We sit at the intersection of service, engineering, manufacturing, software, supplier, and program teams, transforming daily field signals — service requests, pre-delivery findings, time series telemetry, and social escalations — into corrective actions that improve our vehicles and protect the customer experience, and Rivian brand image.

As a Senior Technical Program Manager, Field Quality & Reliability, you will be the connective tissue between field issue identification and cross-functional resolution for the R2 program. Where our data pipelines and triage forums surface emerging issues, you will own what happens next: driving root cause / corrective action accountability, chasing containment and clean points, coordinating failure analysis, and ensuring no issue goes stale. This is a highly people-oriented role — success is measured by your ability to build relationships across dozens of teams, hold owners accountable with empathy and urgency, and relentlessly close the loop.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end follow-up on field-reported issues from daily Field Action Center triage through issue closure, including containment status, temporary and permanent correction action dates, clean point verification, and prevent-recurrence.
• Drive accountability across issue owners in engineering, manufacturing, supplier development, service, and software teams — ensuring every issue has clear action items, responsible parties, and dates, and escalating stale or uncontained issues to leadership.
• Coordinate failure analysis logistics: ensure failed parts are extracted, shipped to failure analysis labs or supplier locations, analyzed, and findings fed back into issue resolution and supplier corrective actions.
• Manage high-touch and VIP customer escalations (social media, executive, tow events), coordinating service centers, engineering, parts expediting, and communications approval chains through resolution.
• Lead cross-functional working sessions and deep dives on active quality issues, driving alignment on containment strategies, repair procedures, service documentation gaps, and factory inspection additions.
• Track and report issue aging metrics — open work orders, parts aging, days-in-service, key-to-key — and partner with service operations to systematically escalate aging service requests.
• Ensure field findings are fed back into pre-delivery checklists, factory quality alerts, careline inspections, service manuals, and D/PFMEAs to prevent recurrence.
• Partner with the field data and reliability engineering team on issue prioritization, freeing analytics resources to focus on detection while you own resolution.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering or a related technical field.
• Typically 5+ years (Senior) or 8+ years (Staff) of experience in automotive or complex electro-mechanical products, including significant experience in quality, field/service engineering, launch quality, or technical program management roles.
• Demonstrated experience driving cross-functional issue resolution — 8D, Six Sigma,RC/CA, A3, Toyota Production System, or similar structured problem-solving frameworks — from identification through verified closure.
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills: you build trust quickly, run effective meetings, write crisp summaries, and are comfortable holding senior stakeholders accountable.
• Strong working knowledge of vehicle quality systems and processes: pre-delivery, containment actions, clean points, supplier quality, failure analysis, and service operations.
• Fluency with tools such as Jira, Confluence, Slack, and service/warranty data systems; comfort reading dashboards and data to prioritize (dashboard development not required — we have that covered).
• Proven ability to operate with limited supervision in a fast-paced launch environment, juggling dozens of concurrent issues without letting any fall through the cracks.
• Experience with vehicle launch programs and field quality monitoring strongly preferred.

Nice to Haves — Working knowledge of:

• Weibull analysis
• Statistics
• Forecasting failure rates
• Design for Reliability (DfR)
• Programming/scripting skills (Python, SQL, leveraging AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, etc.)
• Dashboarding

Pay Disclosure

The salary range for this role is $121,500 - $151,900 for California based applicants. This is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. An employee’s position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, specific competencies, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, shift, and organizational needs.

The successful candidate may be eligible for annual performance bonus and equity awards.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits for full-time and part-time employees, their spouse or domestic partner, and children up to age 26, including but not limited to paid vacation, paid sick leave, and a competitive portfolio of insurance benefits including life, medical, dental, vision, short-term disability insurance, and long-term disability insurance to eligible employees. You may also have the opportunity to participate in Rivian’s 401(k) Plan and Employee Stock Purchase Program if you meet certain eligibility requirements. Full-time employee coverage is effective on their first day of employment. Part-time employee coverage is effective the first of the month following 90 days of employment. More information about benefits is available at rivianbenefits.com .

You can apply for this role through careers.rivian.com (or through internal-careers-rivian.icims.com if you are a current employee). There is no fixed deadline for this application; applications are accepted on an ongoing basis until the role is filled or the opening is no longer needed.

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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