Staff AI Engineer, Enterprise Applied AI

About the role

Rivian is seeking an entrepreneurial, hands-on senior individual contributor to build and scale our Enterprise Applied AI solutions driving impact across internal teams. As a Staff AI Engineer, you will design, build, and operate production-grade systems at the forefront of generative AI, partnering with leaders across the company to unlock transformative business value.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and hands-on development of prioritized AI applications, services, and platforms leveraging state-of-the-art LLM app stacks, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation frameworks, and scalable serving.
• Define long-term architecture and engineering standards for Applied AI systems to maximize reuse, reliability, and impact across multiple product areas.
• Partner with business sponsors to translate high-value opportunities into roadmaps and shipped products with clear success metrics and measurable outcomes.
• Build a holistic view of AI investments by collaborating with adjacent engineering groups implementing AI in their domains, aligning patterns, reusing components, and avoiding duplication.
• Drive continuous improvement in AI methodologies and best practices; evaluate emerging capabilities and land them as secure, production-grade systems.
• Collaborate with Legal, Compliance, Risk, Audit, and Security to embed robust governance, privacy, security, safety, and reporting practices across the AI lifecycle.
• Champion AI literacy, enablement, and adoption through demos, guidance, and technical leadership across the org.
• Mentor engineers across levels; lead design reviews; improve code quality, reliability, observability, and cost/performance of AI workloads.
• Establish rigorous evaluation, guardrails, and monitoring practices; instrument offline and online metrics to ensure quality, safety, and SLOs.
• Optimize latency, throughput, and cost at scale; guide make/buy decisions and vendor integrations where appropriate.

Qualifications

• BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years in software engineering, with a proven track record delivering complex, production-ready systems in enterprise environments.
• Deep technical knowledge in AI/ML, with hands-on experience building and deploying solutions using language models, retrieval/grounding, embeddings/vector search, and evaluation.
• Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous business problems into robust AI products with measurable business impact.
• Experience defining and evolving architectures, standards, and platforms that create leverage across multiple teams.
• Strong familiarity with security, privacy, compliance, safety, and auditability for enterprise AI systems.
• Excellence in communication and stakeholder management; able to influence and align across diverse teams.
• Proven curiosity and mental agility to learn and apply new technologies through hands-on development and continuous learning.