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

Rivian•Irvine, CA

9d•Onsite

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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

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

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.