Senior Lead, People Process Excellence & AI

Rivian•Atlanta, GA

6h•Onsite

About The Position

The People Operational Excellence & AI team sits at the intersection of process design, people systems, and artificial intelligence. We build the operating infrastructure that enables Rivian's 14,000+ person workforce — from the plant floor in Normal, IL to corporate and commercial teams — to move faster, smarter, and with fewer manual workarounds. We own the technology portfolio, AI adoption strategy, and process transformation agenda for Rivian's People function. Our current priorities span a portfolio of AI-enabled automation initiatives across the employee lifecycle — all in service of building a People team that operates with the same rigor and precision as the vehicles we make. We're looking for someone who can map a broken process in the morning and design an AI-assisted future state in the afternoon. This role is the connective tissue between how Rivian's People team works today and how it needs to work to meet the growing demands and complexity of our rapidly scaling global organization. You'll lead process mapping and redesign across our highest-priority initiatives — Talent Acquisition transformation, Internal Mobility, onboarding, employee support, and shared services — while bringing an AI efficiency lens to every intervention. You'll translate process realities from the ground floor into system requirements, identify where automation creates genuine leverage, and help the People team build the muscle to work differently. This is a consulting, project management, and hands-on builder role all at once. It's an operator who diagnoses like a consultant, drives like a project manager, designs like a systems thinker, and builds things that stick. Design the way People work: Help define how core People work is structured, documented, and executed across COEs, Shared Services, Talent Acquisition, and People Partners so Rivian can scale with less friction and more clarity. Unlock capacity through AI and automation: Identify practical opportunities to apply AI agents, workflow automation, and knowledge management to reduce manual work, improve quality, and create more space for strategic work. Connect process reality to platform decisions: Bridge People, IT, and Data to ensure our systems and workflows reflect how work actually happens on the ground — not just how it is intended to happen on paper. Strengthen the foundation for scale: As Rivian continues to grow, help standardize global practices, improve cross-team handoffs, and build the People infrastructure needed to support a 14,000+ person workforce across manufacturing, commercial, and corporate environments.

Requirements

6+ years of experience in People Operations, HR transformation, process excellence, management consulting, or related fields within complex, scaling organizations, with a track record of redesigning — not just documenting — cross-functional processes.
Strong working knowledge of Workday — not configuration ownership, but deep enough fluency in its data model, workflows, and capabilities that you can translate a process problem into a real Workday-based solution and write requirements the Workday team can build from. You know what the system can and can't do without needing to build it yourself.
Practical fluency with AI tools and agentic workflows. You understand how AI agents are built — prompting, tool/function calling, system integration — well enough to design real solutions and prototype where useful, then scope and hand off cleanly to engineering for production builds.
Strong systems-thinking capability, with the ability to connect strategy, operations, employee experience, data, and technology into clear and actionable recommendations.
Strong facilitation skills: capable of running a workshop with skeptical stakeholders and arriving at a clear process map, agreed-on requirements, and concrete next steps.
Ability to move fluidly between strategic framing and hands-on execution — you write the brief and do the work.
Clear, concise written communication: you'll regularly translate operational complexity into technical requirements and stakeholder-ready narratives.
Experience partnering closely with IT, digital, systems, or engineering teams to define requirements, evaluate options, and prioritize work across platforms.
Comfort operating in ambiguity. Rivian moves fast. The problems are rarely fully defined when you arrive.

Nice To Haves

Experience in high-growth technology, EV, manufacturing, or similarly complex operating environments.
Background in Lean, Six Sigma, design thinking, or service design applied to People or service-delivery processes.
Experience designing AI governance frameworks or responsible AI policies for HR applications.
Prior experience supporting global HR operations, shared services, employee service delivery, or other scaled operating models.
Experience supporting manufacturing, plant operations, or deskless/hourly workforce environments.

Responsibilities

Map processes end-to-end, not just on paper. Lead current and future-state process mapping across People initiatives — from Talent Acquisition and Internal Mobility to onboarding, employee support, and shared services. Go deep enough to surface the real problems: the workarounds, the undocumented exceptions, and the places where work falls through the cracks between teams.
Establish practical standards. Define process design, documentation, handoff, and governance standards so teams can execute more consistently and scale with less variability.
Identify and eliminate friction. Surface sources of avoidable demand and manual lift, then lead simplification efforts with measurable impact on cycle time, quality, throughput, and user experience.
Design AI-and-Workday-enabled process solutions. Translate process problems into concrete solutions that leverage Workday and AI agents. Prototype where it helps make the idea real, and partner with Workday and Engineering teams to get them built.
Turn process maps into system requirements. Translate mapped workflows into clear, actionable requirements that Engineering & Technology partners can build and configure in Workday, ServiceNow, iCIMS, and related tools. Be the bridge between what the business needs and what the technology team delivers.
Build working solutions, not just recommendations. Use AI-assisted development tools to move from a business problem to a working prototype alongside HR leaders — building custom scripts, lightweight automations, and workflow tools that solve real, everyday pain without waiting in an engineering queue. You don't need to be a software engineer; you need to be someone who can sit with a stakeholder, understand what's actually broken, and ship something that works.
Find and scope automation opportunities. Identify where AI agents, workflow automation, case deflection, or LLM-assisted tools can eliminate manual lift — and where they can't. Develop structured business cases for investment prioritization, including effort estimates, projected savings, and risk.
Apply sound judgment. Distinguish where AI creates real leverage, where workflow automation is the better answer, and where process redesign or change management is the actual need.
Measure what matters. Define baseline and target metrics — cycle time, cost, volume, error rate — for every process redesign, and build the dashboards needed to track adoption and savings after launch, not just at the design stage.
Partner with IT, People Systems, and Data teams to ensure solutions are grounded in real workflows, integrated thoughtfully, and supported by strong measurement and feedback loops.
Facilitate high-stakes working sessions. Run process mapping workshops, future-state design sessions, and cross-functional working groups with HR leaders, HRBPs, Talent Acquisition, Enterprise Technology, Shared Services, and operational teams. Come in prepared, keep things moving, and leave with decisions made and owners named.
Lead change management and adoption. Drive communication and adoption efforts tied to process redesign, work transitions, and new digital capabilities across the People organization.
Influence through ambiguity. Help teams clarify roles, build new habits, and adopt more scalable ways of working during periods of high change.
Act as an internal process consultant. Embed in People initiatives as a strategic thought partner — not just a documenter. Diagnose root causes, challenge assumptions, recommend redesigns, and help leaders distinguish between a process problem, a systems problem, and a change management problem.
Streamline how the People team works. Identify friction in the team's internal operating model — handoffs, decision rights, communication loops, duplicated effort — and build infrastructure that helps the function operate with more consistency and less noise.
Build AI fluency across the team. Stay current on relevant tools, run practical experiments, and help the broader People team develop the capability to work with AI in their day-to-day. Contribute to Rivian's internal AI learning program.