Staff Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

Rivian•Palo Alto, CA

1d•Onsite

About The Position

About Rivian Rivian is on a mission to keep the world adventurous forever. This goes for the emissions-free Electric Adventure Vehicles we build, and the curious, courageous souls we seek to attract. As a company, we constantly challenge what’s possible, never simply accepting what has always been done. We reframe old problems, seek new solutions and operate comfortably in areas that are unknown. Our backgrounds are diverse, but our team shares a love of the outdoors and a desire to protect it for future generations. Role Summary Are you a Staff or Lead-level Platform Engineer passionate about developer experience (DevEx), build and release engineering, and robust infrastructure? We are looking for a hands-on expert to drive continuous integration, release management, and self-service capabilities across our core stack. You will join a customer-success-focused team of engineers building Rivian's Internal Developer Platform (IDP). In this role, you will design, implement, and maintain the platform offerings that streamline our software development lifecycle. By championing standard platform engineering practices and prioritizing DevEx, you will empower Commercial Technology engineering teams to reliably and securely ship products that drive Rivian's business forward—reducing cognitive load and minimizing friction from local development through rigorous release pipelines, and into production.

Requirements

Primary Toolchain & Adaptability: Our core in-house tooling utilizes GitLab, GitLab CI, Argo CD, and Helm. However, candidates with strong experience in equivalent systems (e.g., GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Flux, Kustomize) will absolutely be considered, provided you are highly interested in learning and can quickly master new tooling.
Experience: 7–10 years in Platform Engineering, Developer Experience, Build and Release Engineering, or DevOps, supporting large-scale software engineering organizations.
DevEx Focus: Proven track record of improving developer productivity, building self-service platforms, and reducing friction in the software development lifecycle.
CI/CD & Release Expertise: Proven track record of building complex, automated CI/CD pipelines and leading release management processes. Deep familiarity with enterprise CI/CD platforms and container registries.
Kubernetes & Cloud: Hands-on experience with container orchestration platforms (e.g., AWS EKS, GKE, AKS) and cloud operations. Strong background in Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) is highly preferred.
GitOps Proficiency: Practical experience with GitOps methodologies and automated Kubernetes deployments.
Coding & Scripting: 4–6 years of software development and automation experience. As a Staff-level engineer, you must possess the coding proficiency to architect in-house platform tooling. Strong shell scripting skills (e.g., Bash) are required. Additionally, strong fluency in Go is highly preferred, but experience in comparable systems languages (e.g., Python, Rust, Java, C#) with an appetite to ramp up on Go quickly is acceptable.
SCM Administration: Experience overseeing, administering, and scaling enterprise version control systems.

Nice To Haves

Branching Strategies: Familiarity with various branching strategies (e.g., Trunk-based development, GitFlow) to effectively support and optimize the SDLC is a plus.

Responsibilities

Reduce Cognitive Load: Build, maintain, and advocate for self-service developer tooling and platforms that abstract away complex underlying systems, empowering developers to deploy securely and autonomously.
Optimize Developer Workflows: Continuously assess and improve local development environments, build times, and the overall developer feedback loop.
DevEx Metrics & Advocacy: Track and improve engineering efficiency using both qualitative feedback and quantitative baseline data to identify bottlenecks. Treat internal developers as customers by gathering insights and translating them into actionable platform enhancements.
Architect CI/CD Pipelines: Design and automate scalable, end-to-end CI/CD pipelines using enterprise continuous integration platforms, integrating automated testing frameworks and deployment tools.
Release Management: Define, manage, and optimize the release lifecycle. Standardize release cadences, versioning, and rollback strategies to ensure predictable, low-risk deployments.
Toolchain Integration: Evaluate and integrate modern developer tools, including AI-assisted coding and review assistants (e.g., Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot), into the SDLC to accelerate developer flow.
GitOps Orchestration: Drive declarative GitOps application deployments, rollouts, and rollbacks using modern deployment controllers.
Workload Standardization: Curate and manage centralized deployment manifests and templates used across multiple projects to standardize application delivery to Kubernetes.
Containerization: Leverage containerization technologies (e.g., Docker, containerd) to package, distribute, and run applications consistently across all environments.
Source Control Governance: Oversee Source Code Management (SCM) architecture, ensuring system stability, scalable configuration, and strategic alignment with the broader engineering organization.
System Monitoring: Monitor platform performance, troubleshoot system issues, and enforce modern usage practices across all development teams.
Automated Quality Gates: Define and implement a robust, automated production readiness process. Ensure all releases meet strict standards for quality, observability, compliance, security, and alerting before hitting production.
Continuous Compliance: Embed production readiness checks directly into the CI/CD pipeline to guarantee that deployed apps and services remain compliant over time.
Engineering Partnership: Act as a strategic partner to development teams, identifying pipeline bottlenecks and providing actionable solutions for build and release challenges.
Technical Mentorship: Provide expert guidance on CI/CD best practices, release engineering strategies, and GitOps deployments.