Staff Software Engineer, Platform

Role Summary

Consumer Platform builds and operates backend services that power customer-facing digital experiences. As a Staff Backend Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership across important platform initiatives: shaping architecture, delivering reliable services and APIs, and helping multiple engineers and teams make sound technical decisions.

You will work hands-on while leading through influence. You will bring clarity to ambiguous problems, surface risks and trade-offs early, and balance long-term platform health with pragmatic delivery. Our backend stack centers on Go, and our systems require thoughtful API design, security, and dependable operation at scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and delivery of backend services and platform capabilities, from problem framing and design through launch and operation.
• Design clear, secure, version-able APIs and service contracts; guide integration patterns across teams.
• Build and evolve distributed, event-driven systems, applying sound judgment around reliability, scalability, performance, and data consistency.
• Raise the bar for Go engineering practices, code quality, testing, and maintainable service design.
• Set technical direction for complex, cross-team initiatives; make trade-offs explicit and align stakeholders on decisions and interfaces.
• Take ownership of production readiness, including observability, deployment safety, incident response, and follow-through on operational improvements.
• Identify architectural bottlenecks and simplify or modernize systems where doing so improves customer experience, developer effectiveness, or system performance.
• Mentor and coach engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and day-to-day collaboration; delegate meaningful ownership rather than becoming a delivery bottleneck.
• Partner with product, design, client, security, and other engineering teams to turn customer and business needs into durable technical solutions.

Qualifications

• Significant professional experience building and operating backend software in production, with depth in Go or a comparable language and the ability to contribute in Go.
• A track record of designing and delivering distributed services, APIs, and systems that meet real-world reliability and performance needs.
• Strong system-design skills, including the ability to clarify ambiguous requirements, identify edge cases, reason about failure modes, and explain architectural trade-offs.
• Experience with API design and service contracts, and a security-minded approach to backend development.
• Practical operational judgment: experience with observability, deployment strategies, incident response, and improving service health over time.
• The ability to lead across team boundaries by communicating clearly, building alignment, and helping others make effective technical decisions.
• A collaborative leadership and mentorship style that develops engineers, gives actionable feedback, and holds a high quality bar without slowing delivery unnecessarily.
• A pragmatic approach to balancing technical quality, delivery needs, and longer-term platform investment.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with event-driven architectures, asynchronous processing, or streaming systems.
• Experience evolving or decomposing large or tightly coupled systems into modular services.
• Experience improving the performance, resilience, or operability of customer-facing platforms.
• Experience working across distributed teams, time zones, or organizational boundaries

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.