Sr. Staff ML Engineer, Autonomy Model Pretraining

Responsibilities

• Lead technical strategy for pretraining large-scale autonomy foundation models.
• Develop pretraining objectives for multi-sensor driving data, including camera, LiDAR, radar, maps, route, and vehicle-state inputs.
• Study scaling trends across model size, data scale, compute, sensor mix, and downstream autonomy performance.
• Build and improve distributed training workflows for large models, including FSDP, mixed precision, checkpointing, and training performance optimization.
• Partner with perception, prediction, planning, simulation, data, and ML infrastructure teams to connect pretraining progress to real autonomy outcomes.
• Develop evaluations that measure representation quality, downstream task performance, and closed-loop behavior.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership on model architecture, training stability, scaling, and evaluation.

Qualifications

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience building large-scale ML systems.
• Strong experience training large neural networks with distributed training frameworks.
• Deep understanding of transformers, representation learning, self-supervised learning, or foundation models.
• Strong PyTorch experience, including distributed training, mixed precision, and large-scale training pipelines.
• Strong engineering judgment and ability to lead ambiguous technical efforts from prototype to production impact.

Pay

The salary range for this role is $265,000 - $331,000 for California based applicants.

Benefits

• Paid vacation, paid sick leave.
• Competitive portfolio of insurance benefits including life, medical, dental, vision, short-term disability insurance, and long-term disability insurance.
• Eligibility for annual performance bonus and equity awards.
• Participation in Rivian’s 401(k) Plan and Employee Stock Purchase Program.

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.