Software Engineer II, Vehicle Data Services

Role Summary

Our portfolio spans five distinct systems:

• A high-throughput telemetry query layer, serving time-series and aggregate queries against a real-time analytical store.
• A low-latency current-state service, answering "what is this vehicle doing right now" in under 100 milliseconds.
• A cloud control plane that pushes configuration out to vehicles at fleet scale and tracks every push through to acknowledgement.
• A semantic metadata layer - the registry of what each signal means, its units, its provenance, and how it relates to every other signal.
• A unified query gateway fronting all of the above, routing each request to the right backing store based on time range, cardinality, and latency budget.

The interesting problems live between those boxes rather than inside them. A configuration change on the control plane determines what the telemetry layer ingests, which determines what the gateway can route to, which determines what the metadata layer has to describe. An engineer who can hold that whole path in their head is worth more to us than a specialist in any single piece.

You will write production Go and Python, work with document databases and columnar analytical stores, build and consume gRPC and REST APIs, and operate services that run continuously against a global fleet. You will be on call for what you build. You will read a great deal of other people's code, and other people will read a great deal of yours.

Responsibilities

• Building Services
  
  • Design & Deliver: Own backend features (Go, Python, Rust) from design through to production rollout.
  • Extend Configuration: Evolve our declarative, schema-validated configuration system to enable new capabilities by modifying configuration rather than writing handler code.
  • Orchestrate Fleet Config: Manage complex vehicle-side feature lifecycles, focusing on idempotency and reliable state delivery to intermittently connected devices.
  
  Data Platform
  
  • Platform Migration: Lead high-scale analytical store migrations, including schema design, ingestion, dual-writes, and cutover sequencing.
  • Optimize Tiered Storage: Build and maintain intelligent routing logic across low-latency key-value stores, mid-tier aggregation, and long-term lakehouse archives to balance performance and cost.
  • Stream Processing: Architect stateful, fleet-scale streaming consumers for enrichment and anomaly detection, tackling challenges like key skew, backpressure, and exactly-once semantics.
  
  Reliability & Ownership
  
  • Observability: Implement meaningful metrics, logging, and distributed tracing that focus on user-facing symptoms rather than internal noise.
  • Production Support: Own your code in production by participating in on-call rotations, debugging incidents, and driving follow-up work to prevent recurrence.
  • System Integrity: Strengthen test coverage to identify cross-system logic errors and integration defects rather than just unit-level bugs.
  
  Working Across Teams
  
  • Cross-Functional Partnership: Negotiate interface contracts with ingestion, firmware, and authentication teams to maintain clean boundaries.
  • Consumer Support: Directly support internal stakeholders (service engineering, product, autonomy) and use their feedback to drive platform improvements.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field - or the equivalent built the practical way.
• Two or more years building and operating backend services in production. Operating counts as much as building here: we want someone who has been paged, debugged something with the clock running, and shipped the fix.
• Strong proficiency in a statically typed, compiled backend language. Go and Python are what we write most; solid Java, Rust, C++, C#, or Kotlin experience translates well.
• Real working knowledge of at least one database and how it behaves under load - indexing, query planning, connection pooling, and the difference between a query that is correct and a query that is fast. Document stores are closest to our world; strong relational experience is equally credible.
• Practical experience designing and consuming HTTP or REST APIs, with opinions about versioning, backward compatibility, idempotency, and error semantics.
• Comfort with the usual toolchain - Git, containerized local development, CI pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code at least at a read-and-modify level.
• Clear writing. We are distributed across time zones, and most consequential technical decisions get made in a document or a merge request thread rather than a meeting. Writing well is not a soft skill on this team. It is load-bearing.
• Legal authorization to work in Canada.

Preferred Qualifications

• Production experience with Go and gRPC, including schema evolution in live systems.
• Deep expertise in high-cardinality time-series data modeling and real-time/columnar OLAP stores.
• Hands-on experience with distributed stream processing frameworks or distributed logs as primary data transport.
• Background in managing data-intensive systems, including lakehouse architectures and unified machine learning/inference pipelines.
• Experience with IoT fleets, connected devices, or telematics, supported by strong cloud (AWS/Kubernetes) and observability skills.

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 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.

External candidates can apply for this role through the Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies careers site (https://rivianvw.tech/#careers). If you are a current employee, please apply through our internal job board.