UIUC Research Park Intern - Hardware Systems Engineering, Summer 2026

Rivian and VW Group Technology•Champaign, IL

1d•$33 - $40

About The Position

As a Hardware Systems Performance Intern, you will assist efforts within the Hardware Systems Architecture team to characterize performance of low-voltage electrical (LVE) systems in next-gen vehicles, with the aim to influence hardware architecture decision-making in early development stages, and to validate designs in later stages of the development cycle. This role spans the characterization of wireless, network, compute, and power related performance dimensions of various LVE subsystems, including telematics, wireless connectivity, networking, passive/keyless entry, and more.

Requirements

Currently enrolled in a Bachelor's or Master's program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Proficient in Hardware Engineering fundamentals.
Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies internships & co-ops are experiences optimized for student candidates. To be eligible, you must be an undergraduate or graduate student in an accredited program during the entire internship or co-op term. If you are not pursuing a degree, please see our full-time positions at https://rivianvw.tech/#careers. Note that if your university has specific requirements for internship programs, it is your responsibility to fulfill those requirements.

Nice To Haves

Actively pursuing a degree in Electrical Engineering, Electrical Design Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, or a closely related technical field with the intent to return to school following completion of internship.
Familiarity with wireless technologies for ranging, localization and/or radar applications, including UWB, and BLE channel sounding, and their performance evaluation at the RF, and systems level
Hands-on coding experience related to some combination of embedded platform bring-up, system software / applications development, or system-level hardware performance instrumentation, and related test automation / scripting.
Exposure to RF and electrical engineering fundamentals, and hands-on familiarity with related test and measurement equipment, e.g., logic analyzers, oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, DMMs, network analyzers, etc.
Familiarity with embedded computing platforms, and the methods for quantifying performance of their processors, memory / storage systems, and peripheral interfaces.

Responsibilities

Facilitate collaboration between hardware architecture, hardware design and software application teams to build out comprehensive plans that surface key performance metrics, provide insight into system bottlenecks and chokepoints, reveal over-/under-design scenarios, and validate system performance relative to system requirements.
Support the design, integration and automation efforts related to characterization and validation activities on various hardware testing configurations, including early prototypes boards, bench-top sub-system mock-ups, lab cars, mules, and other HIL infrastructure.
Support the end-to-end implementation for systems performance characterization ranging from development of requirements to identification of solutions and their implementation with automation, including integration of h/w and s/w, establishment of control and data acquisition pipelines, and development of downstream data processing infrastructure.