Automation Engineer, EDA

Rivian•Irvine, CA

2d•Onsite

About The Position

Rivian’s Hardware Engineering team designs the complex electronics that power our industry-leading vehicles. To keep our hardware development agile, error-free, and operating at scale, we need robust software pipelines. As an Automation Engineer, EDA (Electronic Design Automation), you will bridge the gap between software development and hardware design. Focused on the Cadence Allegro X ecosystem and Altium, you will develop custom tools, scripts, and backend integrations that empower our electrical engineers to design better circuit boards, faster. You will work directly with PCB layout engineers, schematic designers, and system architects to eliminate bottlenecks, automate repetitive tasks, and seamlessly connect our electrical design applications with enterprise backend systems. You will help develop solutions to analyze results from EDA tools and workflows in the epoch of emerging Agentic AI frameworks. If you are a recent graduate passionate about software engineering, electronics, and building tools that bring physical products to life, this is the perfect role for you.

Requirements

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a closely related field (Recent or upcoming graduate).
Strong foundational knowledge of object-oriented programming and scripting languages, such as Python.
Experience integrating software via REST APIs, GraphQL, or working with enterprise databases (SQL/NoSQL).
A basic understanding of electrical engineering concepts, PCB, Package design workflows.
A highly analytical mindset with the ability to break down complex, multi-step engineering workflows into logical software requirements.
Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to explain software concepts to hardware engineers and vice versa.

Nice To Haves

Experience with TCL, SKILL programming language or developing with Cadence APIs.
Experience with Data visualization technologies such as three.js or Canvas.
Familiarity with the Cadence Allegro Suite (Design Entry HDL, System Capture, Allegro PCB Designer).
Previous internship or project experience involving hardware-in-the-loop, EDA toolchains, or PLM systems (like Enovia or Teamcenter).

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and deploy custom tools and applications including automation scripts and add-ons to the EDA tools such as Cadence Allegro X environment (using SKILL, TCL, Python, or C/C++).
Build robust backend pipelines connecting EDA tools with other critical electrical design applications.
Collaborate closely with Hardware and PCB Layout Engineers to identify workflow inefficiencies, gather requirements, and build software solutions that reduce manual errors and accelerate design cycles.
Develop tools to automate the data extraction from EDA tools and creating custom verifications.
Write clean, documented, and maintainable code, actively participating in code reviews and utilizing version control (Git) within an agile development framework.