Staff Site Reliability Engineer-Production Operations

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies•Palo Alto, CA

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies is a joint venture between two industry leaders with a clear vision for automotive’s next chapter. From operating systems to zonal controllers to cloud and connectivity solutions, we’re addressing the challenges of electric vehicles through technology that will set the standards for software-defined vehicles around the world. The road to the future is uncharted. By combining our expertise across connectivity, AI, security and more, we’ll map a new way forward. Working together, we’ll create a future that’s more connected, more intelligent, more sustainable for everyone. We are looking for an SRE Lead to serve as the senior technical leader and player-coach for ProdOps. This is a hybrid role: you will set the technical direction of the team and lead from the front during incidents, while also growing and managing a small group of exceptional engineers as the function scales. As the calm center during a crisis, you will maintain a high-level mental model of the entire production ecosystem, freeing engineers to focus strictly on debugging and mitigation. You will own the reliability feedback loop end to end, which includes running blameless post-incident reviews, coordinating major incidents across Cloud systems, vehicle development pipelines, and Product Security, driving the systemic action-item backlog with TPMs and development teams, and verifying that fixes hold in production. This role suits a senior systems engineer who still writes code, thinks in terms of systems and failure modes rather than single root causes, and wants to build a lean, automation-first reliability practice rather than staff a support queue.

Requirements

Substantial experience in SRE, production/platform engineering, or systems engineering for large-scale distributed systems, including senior technical leadership or lead responsibilities.
Proven incident command experience: you have coordinated high-severity, cross-functional incidents and led communication with executives and external stakeholders under pressure.
Strong systems engineering fundamentals, including distributed systems, networking, cloud infrastructure, and an instinct for how complex systems fail.
Hands-on coding ability (e.g., Python, Go, or similar) sufficient to build automation, tooling, and integrations. This is not a code-free management role.
Deep observability expertise: instrumentation, metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, dashboards, and SLO/SLI design (Datadog or comparable platforms).
Fluency in modern reliability and post-incident practice: blameless reviews, Learning From Incidents (LFI), HOWIE, and systemic (non-single-root-cause) analysis.
A demonstrated bias toward eliminating toil through automation, and enthusiasm for using AI agents as force multipliers.
Excellent written and verbal communication; able to translate technical detail for executive and cross-company audiences.
Experience mentoring engineers, with the judgment and appetite to grow into formal people management.

Nice To Haves

Experience across both cloud services and hardware/vehicle or embedded development pipelines.
Exposure to Product Security or working closely with security teams during incidents.
Track record building an SRE or reliability function from an early stage.
Experience deploying LLM- or agent-based automation into production operational workflows.

Responsibilities

Lead incident coordination and communication
Drive incident progress and coordinate cross-functional response as the central nervous system during a crisis.
Own executive, customer, and parent-company communications, providing production expertise and communication leadership so engineers can concentrate on the technical problem.
Maintain an accurate, high-level model of the full production ecosystem spanning Cloud, vehicle development pipelines, and Product Security.
Facilitate modern, blameless post-incident learning
Run post-incident reviews using Learning From Incidents (LFI) principles and HOWIE-style reporting.
Move the organization away from the search for a single root cause and toward understanding how tooling, context, and multiple latent conditions combined to produce failure.
Surface weaknesses in observability, process, testing, and tooling that impaired our ability to detect, mitigate, and recover.
Own and prioritize systemic action items
Manage the backlog of action items generated by reviews. While ProdOps does not write the fixes itself, you will prioritize, track, and drive these items to closure in partnership with TPMs and development teams, keeping leadership focused on customer impact.
Measure and verify efficacy
Once the fixes ship, measure and verify that they actually prevent recurrence. Drive accountability for outcomes and feed the results back into the Novel Incident Rate.
Build the automation and observability backbone
Design and build the systems, tooling, and AI-agent workflows that automate incident triage and administrative toil.
Improve observability, including instrumentation, alerting, dashboards, and SLOs, so incidents are detected faster and understood more deeply.
Write and review code where it multiplies the team's impact.
Lead and grow the team
Set technical standards and operating rhythm for ProdOps.
Mentor and develop engineers, and as the team scales, take on hiring and people management while preserving the minimal-headcount, maximum-automation philosophy.