Staff Vehicle Architecture Engineer

Role Summary

The Vehicle System Architecture team owns the vehicle-level mechatronic architecture at Rivian VW Group Technologies. We translate product intent from Brand Product Definition, Program, Cost Engineering, Manufacturing, Strategy and Reliability into parts and function distribution across the vehicle - from product concept through manufacturing.
Responsibilities

1. Architecture Modelling and Trade Studies

• Build and own the parametric models behind vehicle architecture decisions: controller count and placement, functional allocation across zonal and secondary ECUs, sensor and actuator distribution, harness topology.
• Run architecture trade studies with quantified outcomes - cost, mass, harness complexity, power, temperature and environmental, reliability, manufacturability - and ship each study with its model, parameters and sensitivity analysis.
• Build the cost and BOM models that turn architecture options into numbers
• Support cost-down by subtraction: use the models to show which controllers, harness runs and sensors the vehicle can do without, before anyone optimizes what is left.
• Analyze new technology integration with SW HW platform design approach

2. Applied AI for Architecture Work

• Build LLM and agentic pipelines over architecture artifacts: extracting device and interface data from specifications, generating and checking candidate architecture configurations, and surfacing gaps across requirements, device lists and interface definitions.
• Deploy semantic search over requirements, architecture models, device data and prior trade studies
• Integrate AI assistance into the team's toolchain - Flow Engineering, Airtable, GitLab - via APIs and CI pipelines, with human-in-the-loop guardrails.
• Build analytics that connect architecture decisions to what happened downstream: field issues, manufacturing escapes, cost variance - so the next trade study starts better informed,

3. Systems Engineering, Hands-On

• Contribute to vehicle-level STPA, DFMEA and fault analyses, and feed findings back into the architecture and its models.
• Participate in architecture, interface and safety design reviews across domains.
• Correlate models against real vehicle, lab rig and supplier data
• Document the methods you build as playbooks other engineers can run.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• BS/MS in Electrical, Computer, Mechanical, Systems or Aerospace Engineering, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
• 5+ years in vehicle, aerospace or electromechanical systems engineering - or an equivalent record of building the analyses that decided real designs.
• Strong Python - data processing, parametric modelling, automation, prototyping AI workflows.
• Practical experience building LLM applications: RAG pipelines, semantic search, structured extraction or agent frameworks.
• Systems-minded: able to decompose a vehicle into subsystems, functions and interfaces, and reason about how a change in one propagates to the others.
• Comfortable with numbers that carry consequences - cost, mass, power budgets - and with defending them.

Preferred Qualifications

• E/E architecture background: zonal and secondary ECUs, LV power distribution, networks, harness design, CAN/Ethernet, DBC/ARXML.
• Physical simulation tools: OpenModelica, Julia, Spice, Modelica, or FMI/FMU co-simulation.
• Worst-case, tolerance and statistical analysis (WCCA, Monte Carlo, DOE) applied to real designs.
• Hands-on projects involving physical systems - vehicle dynamics, powertrain, robotics, Formula SAE, Baja SAE, solar car or similar.
• Manufacturing or DFM exposure - you have seen what an architecture decision does on the line.
• GitLab CI/CD; AI portfolio applying LLMs or ML to engineering artifacts - academic or personal projects count.
• STPA, DFMEA or fault tree analysis know-how.

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.