Sr. Staff ML Engineer, Autonomy Model Pretraining

Rivian • Palo Alto, CA

7d

About The Position

We are seeking a Sr. Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead model pretraining efforts for our Large Driving Model, an end-to-end autonomy model that learns from large-scale, multi-sensor driving data. This role is focused on building the foundation model layer for self-driving: scaling larger models, improving pretraining objectives, understanding scaling laws, and developing the distributed training systems needed to train models across massive real-world and simulated datasets. This is an ideal role for someone excited by the intersection of large-scale ML, autonomous driving, multi-modal representation learning, and high-performance distributed training.

Requirements

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Robotics, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience building large-scale ML systems.
• Strong experience training large neural networks with distributed training frameworks.
• Deep understanding of transformers, representation learning, self-supervised learning, or foundation models.
• Strong PyTorch experience, including distributed training, mixed precision, and large-scale training pipelines.
• Strong engineering judgment and ability to lead ambiguous technical efforts from prototype to production impact.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical strategy for pretraining large-scale autonomy foundation models.
• Develop pretraining objectives for multi-sensor driving data, including camera, LiDAR, radar, maps, route, and vehicle-state inputs.
• Study scaling trends across model size, data scale, compute, sensor mix, and downstream autonomy performance.
• Build and improve distributed training workflows for large models, including FSDP, mixed precision, checkpointing, and training performance optimization.
• Partner with perception, prediction, planning, simulation, data, and ML infrastructure teams to connect pretraining progress to real autonomy outcomes.
• Develop evaluations that measure representation quality, downstream task performance, and closed-loop behavior.
• Mentor engineers and provide technical leadership on model architecture, training stability, scaling, and evaluation.

Benefits

• paid vacation
• paid sick leave
• life insurance
• medical insurance
• dental insurance
• vision insurance
• short-term disability insurance
• long-term disability insurance
• annual performance bonus
• equity awards
• Rivian’s 401(k) Plan
• Employee Stock Purchase Program

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: Ph.D. or professional degree