Staff Software Engineer, Vehicle Configuration Platform

About Us 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. Role Summary A single firmware release must serve every vehicle variant we build across both Rivian and all Volkswagen brands. The vehicle configuration platform that the OTA team supports makes that possible: a schema-driven system that defines every configurable attribute of a vehicle and provisions them onto vehicles in the factory, in service, and over the air customer updates. Getting this wrong can mean anything from the wrong information showing on the driver display to a car that needs to be towed in for service. You will be a technical leader on the team that owns this platform, working as a peer to its lead architect. Where the architect drives the structural evolution of the configuration system itself, you will own the health, reliability, and scalability of everything around it: the compilation and code generation pipelines, the validation and release infrastructure, the provisioning path from schema to vehicle, and the developer experience of every engineer who touches configuration. You will set technical direction for this surface area, drive initiatives that span firmware, build infrastructure, release engineering, OTA, and factory integration across two companies' engineering organizations, and raise the bar for how the team designs, reviews, and ships. This role is based in our Berlin office and requires a minimum of three days per week onsite, with occasional travel to other company and partner sites as needed.   Responsibilities • Own the technical direction for configuration tooling, validation, and delivery infrastructure, translating platform architecture into a concrete, sequenced roadmap and driving it to completion across teams. • Lead initiatives that simplify the platform: consolidating redundant mechanisms, retiring legacy pathways, and reducing the coordination cost of routine changes, while every downstream consumer keeps working. • Design the compatibility strategy for data contracts deployed to devices in the field, and build the automated enforcement that makes schema evolution provably safe rather than carefully reviewed. • Architect the validation and release pipeline as a product: define what classes of defects must be impossible to merge, and build the layered checks, staged rollouts, and observability that get there. • Serve as the senior escalation point for production configuration issues, leading root cause analysis during launches and field events and converting each incident into systemic prevention. • Drive alignment across organizational boundaries, negotiating shared contracts, review processes, and release mechanics with firmware, cloud, diagnostics, manufacturing, and partner-brand stakeholders who have differing constraints and conventions. • Mentor and multiply the engineers on the team, setting standards through design review, raising the quality of technical writing and decision records, and growing the mid-level engineers toward ownership. • Be accountable for the long-term maintenance cost of what the team ships.   Qualifications Minimum Qualifications: • 8+ years of software engineering experience, including demonstrated ownership of a platform, infrastructure, or developer-facing system used by many teams. • A track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives from proposal through delivery, including ones that required deprecating or migrating away from entrenched systems. • Deep experience with serialization formats such as Protocol Buffers, including designing schemas with strict backward and forward compatibility guarantees for devices you cannot force-update. • Strong Python and working C literacy; real depth in a modern build system such as Bazel, including writing rules and repository-level integration, not just consuming builds. • Mature CI/CD and release engineering judgment: you design validation gates and rollout mechanics that encode correctness in automation, and you know which guarantees belong in tooling versus process. • Sound judgment under production pressure: you can lead a time-critical fix during a vehicle launch, and you also know when to refuse a shortcut or fence one in and drive its removal afterward. • Excellent written and verbal communication with internal and external stakeholders, including the ability to explain tradeoffs to non-software audiences and to write decision documents that hold up over time. • The instinct to lead through leverage: you measure your impact by what the team and its users can do without you. Preferred Qualifications • Automotive or embedded domain experience: UDS diagnostics, vehicle variant coding, factory provisioning, or OTA update systems. • Rust experience. • Experience operating in multi-company or partner-engineering environments with separate review and release processes. • Experience with code generation toolchains such as protoc plugins or template-based generators. • Familiarity with manifest-based multi-repository workflows. Total Rewards 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 r