Sr. Staff Systems Engineer Autonomy

In this role you will define, mature, and own requirements for the remote assistance platform. This platform is a key part of Rivian’s autonomy stack, providing essential mechanisms to keep our fully autonomous vehicles operational as we build capabilities to handle the “long tail” of driving edge cases.

• Define, mature, and own requirements for:
• Vehicle authority and how the vehicle validates remote assistance advisory input before taking action
• Escalation trigger logic such as for cases where the vehicle needs assistance finding a compliant path
• Advisory input taxonomy such as what remote operators can provide to the vehicles
• Input freshness and how to bound validity of an advisory input
• Situational data sufficiency such as what vehicles provide to the remote operators and its validity
• Degraded behavior such as how to handle imperfect network connectivity Link integrity and security such as authentication of the information and commands transmitted between the vehicle and the operator
• Evidentiary logging
• Onboard/offboard interface boundary
• Translating policy/legal-defined authority boundaries regarding law enforcement and first responder interactions into system requirements, coordinated with exterior communication systems
• Author and maintain specifications that serve as the authoritative source of truth for the software infrastructure implementation team
• Define acceptance criteria and verification strategies
• Author test specifications that can be executed at the device, bench, or HIL level to verify and validate pertinent pipelines
• Work with the team to build automated verification capabilities for platform-level requirements
• Serve as the primary technical interface between the systems engineering team and the software infrastructure team for remote assistance topics
• Collaborate with the hardware engineering team on functional and performance KPI definition, resource allocation, and platform topology decisions Participate in design reviews for platform software implementations, providing architectural feedback grounded in the specifications you own *

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in electrical engineering, computer engineering, software engineering, computer science, or a related field
• 10+ years of experience in embedded systems, automotive software platforms, or autonomous vehicle compute systems
• Experience with telemetry pipeline development
• Experience with Linux based systems
• Familiarity with secure communications design or automotive cybersecurity practices
• Familiarity with functional safety development processes (ISO 26262)
• Experience writing system or software architecture documents, requirements specifications, and interface definitions
• Proficiency in Python (for tooling, automation, data analysis)
• Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally with implementation teams, translating architecture into actionable specifications
• Experience with requirements management tools (DOORS, Polarion, Jama, or similar)
• Prior work at an OEM, Tier 1, or autonomy technology company