Software Engineer, Edge AI

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies • Palo Alto, CA

8d • $116,300 - $159,950

About The Position

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies is a joint venture focused on automotive software, including operating systems, zonal controllers, cloud and connectivity solutions, and software for electric vehicles. The Connectivity Edge AI team builds vehicle software for processing and interpreting vehicle data. Its work includes running AI models on vehicle hardware, uploading and retrieving large data payloads such as camera clips and ADAS recordings, and delivering connected features such as live camera streaming and mobile video downloads. The software is deployed across Rivian R1 and R2 vehicles, last-mile delivery vehicles, and Volkswagen Group platforms, and must support multiple hardware generations and operating systems.

This is a hands-on individual-contributor role for an early-career engineer. The engineer will write C++ or Rust services that run inside vehicles under fixed CPU and memory budgets and latency targets. Initial work will be selected based on the candidate's strengths and team needs, and may involve the telemetry platform, the high-throughput upload path for ADAS and camera data, embedded inference for the voice assistant, or customer-facing features built on these systems. The team prioritizes demonstrated ability to build complex software over years of experience or familiarity with a particular technology stack.

The role involves building and maintaining native vehicle services across Linux, Android, and QNX; improving telemetry and vehicle data transfer; deploying and optimizing machine-learning models on vehicle NPUs; and instrumenting, testing, benchmarking, and debugging software on bench hardware and in vehicles. Engineers also write design documents and participate in code reviews. The team offers early ownership, broad project scope, and support from senior engineers.

Requirements

• Two to four years of software engineering experience, or a BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field with equivalent demonstrated building experience.
• Demonstrated evidence of building complex software systems, through projects such as hackathons, competitions, university engineering teams, internships, open-source contributions, or production work.
• Strong Linux and systems fundamentals, including processes, threading and concurrency, memory, inter-process communication, and filesystems.
• Ability to debug running systems using tools such as gdb, perf, and strace.
• Proficiency in either C++ or Rust.
• Ability to methodically debug large, interconnected systems.
• Clear written communication in design documents, tickets, and code reviews.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with inference runtimes such as ONNX Runtime, TensorRT, TFLite, llama.cpp, ExecuTorch, or a silicon vendor SDK, including quantization and deployment to constrained hardware.
• Experience with audio or speech models, including speech recognition, text-to-speech, wake-word detection, voice activity detection, or audio signal processing.
• Android development experience, particularly AOSP, the audio stack, HALs, Binder, or JNI.
• Experience with embedded, automotive, robotics, or other resource-constrained real-time systems.
• Experience with networking and large-scale data transfer, including throughput tuning, gRPC or similar IPC frameworks, and observability tooling.
• Contributions to open-source systems or ML infrastructure projects.

Responsibilities

• Design and build native C++ or Rust services that run on vehicle compute across Linux, Android, and QNX targets.
• Work on the telemetry platform, including signal collection, on-vehicle metrics, diagnostics, and configuration tools for fleet reporting.
• Improve vehicle data uploads over Wi-Fi and cellular, including throughput, reliability, event-triggered and on-demand retrieval, and fleet-scale transfer costs.
• Deploy and optimize machine-learning models on vehicle NPUs, including speech recognition, synthesis, and wake-word detection, while meeting per-platform latency and accuracy targets.
• Instrument software for field debugging and use collected data to identify and fix issues on real vehicles.
• Benchmark and soak-test software and defend performance budgets to catch regressions before release.
• Write design documents, review code, and debug on bench hardware and in vehicles.

Benefits

• Competitive base salary.
• Eligibility for an annual company performance bonus program for full-time positions; payments are discretionary and not guaranteed.
• Eligibility for equity in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), subject to board approval, applicable plans, and vesting requirements.
• Health coverage.
• Retirement savings.
• Time off.
• Family planning programs.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Entry Level