Software Engineer, Edge AI at Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies in Palo Alto, California

Job description

• Application
• 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.
• This is a hands-on individual contributor role for an engineer early in their career who wants real systems problems. You will write C++/Rust for services that run inside a car, under fixed CPU and memory budgets, latency targets a customer can feel, and no ability to redeploy in an afternoon.
• Where you start depends on your strengths and what the team needs at the time. You will work on one of the following areas as a starting project: the telemetry platform, the high-throughput upload path for ADAS and camera data, embedded inference for the voice assistant, and customer-facing features built on top of all three.
• We care far more about evidence that you build hard things than about years of experience or the particular stack you have used.
• Edge AI sits where vehicle software turns into a product decision. The scope is broad enough that you will not spend years on one narrow thing, and the team is small enough that your work is visible in the car. You will get real ownership early, with senior engineers around to review it.

Responsibilities

• Design and build native services in C++/Rust that run on vehicle compute across Linux, Android, and QNX targets.
• Work on the telemetry platform: signal collection, metrics derived on the vehicle rather than in the cloud, diagnostics, and the tooling engineering teams use to configure what a fleet reports.
• Improve the vehicle data upload path, including throughput and reliability over Wi-Fi and cellular, event-triggered and on-demand retrieval, and the cost of moving data at fleet scale.
• Deploy and optimize ML models on the vehicle's NPU, including speech recognition, synthesis, and wake-word detection, and hold them to per-platform latency and accuracy targets.
• Instrument what you build so it can be debugged in the field, then use that data to find and fix problems on real vehicles.
• Benchmark, soak test, and defend performance budgets so regressions are caught before they ship.
• Write design docs, review code, and debug on bench hardware and in vehicles.

Requirements

• 2-4 years of software engineering experience, or a BS or MS in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related field with equivalent demonstrated building experience.
• Demonstrated evidence of building complex software systems. This can come from anywhere: hackathons, project or robotics competitions, a university tech club or engineering team, a substantial internship, open-source contributions, or production work at a previous job. We want to hear about something you built, what was genuinely hard about it, and how you got it working.
• Strong Linux and systems fundamentals: processes, threading and concurrency, memory, inter-process communication, and filesystems, plus the ability to debug a running system with tools like gdb, perf, and strace.
• Proficiency in either C++ or Rust.
• Ability to do methodical debugging on large interconnected systems.
• Clear written communication in design docs, tickets, and code reviews.
• Experience with inference runtimes such as ONNX Runtime, TensorRT, TFLite, llama.cpp, ExecuTorch, or a silicon vendor SDK, including quantization and deployment to constrained hardware.
• Experience with audio or speech models: speech recognition, text to speech, wake-word detection, voice activity detection, or audio signal processing.
• Android development experience, particularly AOSP, the audio stack, HALs, Binder, or JNI.
• Embedded, automotive, robotics, or other resource-constrained real-time systems.
• Networking and large-scale data transfer: throughput tuning, gRPC or similar IPC frameworks, and observability tooling.
• Contributions to open-source systems or ML infrastructure projects.

Skills

Required

• C++
• Rust
• Linux
• Debugging with gdb, perf, strace
• Clear written communication

Benefits

• We build the exceptional — and we believe the people doing that work should be rewarded accordingly. In addition to a competitive base salary, full-time positions may be is eligible to participate in our annual company performance bonus program.
• Payments are discretionary and not guaranteed; actual amounts depend on company results and the terms of the plan in effect, and require active employment at the time of payout. This role is also eligible for equity in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), subject to board approval and the terms of our equity incentive plans, including applicable vesting requirements.
• In addition to our compensation programs, we invest in our people with a comprehensive benefits package designed to support the health, wellbeing, and financial future for full-time employees — including health coverage, retirement savings, time off, and family planning programs. Offerings vary by country. Learn more about our global benefit programs.