Technical Lead Manager, Enterprise AI

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies • Palo Alto, CA

8d • $265,000 - $364,450

About The Position

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies (RVT) is seeking a Technical Lead Manager, Enterprise AI to productionize AI tools and scale their use across engineering teams. The role leads a small engineering team and partners with engineering leaders across domains to make AI a practical part of software development. The manager remains hands-on, spending about half of their time on architecture, design reviews, and building.

Requirements

• BS or MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including production systems in enterprise environments.
• 2+ years leading engineers as a tech lead or engineering manager.
• Hands-on experience building and operating AI-native developer tools, internal platforms, or CI/CD systems in production.
• Hands-on experience with language models and agents in production, including tool use, context management, and evaluation across open-source and proprietary models.
• Deep familiarity with current AI developments and the judgment to distinguish production-ready capabilities from those that are not yet ready.
• Experience designing abstractions that keep tooling portable across model providers and frameworks.
• Experience defining architectures and standards that create leverage across multiple teams.
• Working knowledge of security, privacy, and auditability for AI-enabled developer tooling.
• Strong communication skills and ability to influence engineering leaders across domains.

Responsibilities

• Set the direction and roadmap for reusable AI tooling, including agent runtimes, evaluation, skills, plugins, and agentic loops.
• Build AI tooling that can work with both open-source and proprietary models and remain portable as model options evolve.
• Apply AI across the software development lifecycle, including code review, testing, and triage, in partnership with engineering leaders.
• Lead design reviews and personally build prioritized AI services and developer tools, owning reliability, observability, and cost.
• Identify shared patterns and reusable components across engineering groups and prevent duplicate work.
• Set standards for evaluation, guardrails, and monitoring, measuring quality, safety, and developer impact across models.
• Measure and communicate impact through cycle time, quality, and time saved from low-value work.
• Optimize AI workload speed and affordability and make build-versus-buy decisions.
• Build security, privacy, and auditability into tools in partnership with Security, Compliance, and Audit.
• Work with DevEx, IT, and domain teams to shape useful AI-native development workflows.
• Lead and develop a small team of engineers.

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 and applicable plan terms and vesting requirements.
• Comprehensive benefits package for full-time employees, including health coverage, retirement savings, time off, and family planning programs; offerings vary by country.

What This Job Offers

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