Software Engineer II - Streaming

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

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies are seeking a Software Engineer II to join the Data Platform Streaming team in Palo Alto, California. We are looking for strong software engineers with proven experience building and operating modern real-time data platforms. This team develops the streaming infrastructure that powers vehicle telemetry, connected services, analytics, AI/ML platforms, and commercial fleet integrations across Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies.

This is a hands on software engineering role focused on designing and building scalable, low-latency, fault tolerant streaming systems. The ideal candidate has strong experience with Apache Kafka or Redpanda, Apache Flink, distributed systems, and cloud native technologies. They are passionate about building reliable real-time data infrastructure that enables event-driven applications, machine learning, AI-powered experiences, and intelligent vehicle platforms.

At the RIV-4 level, engineers are expected to demonstrate strong technical fundamentals, contribute meaningfully to team objectives, work with increasing autonomy, and collaborate effectively across engineering teams while continuously growing their technical expertise.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain scalable real-time streaming services that ingest, process, transform, and deliver vehicle, cloud, and operational data at scale.

• Design, develop, and operate Apache Flink applications and event-driven services using Apache Kafka or Redpanda.

• Build streaming infrastructure that powers analytics, machine learning, AI applications, and real-time operational decision making.

• Design scalable event-driven architectures with emphasis on throughput, low latency, resiliency, and operational simplicity.

• Develop production-grade streaming applications using Java, Scala, Python, or Go following software engineering best practices.

• Contribute to scalable streaming architectures including topic design, partitioning strategy, checkpointing, savepoints, dead letter queues (DLQs), replay strategies, and failure recovery.

• Optimize streaming applications for latency, throughput, resource utilization, and operational cost through performance tuning and continuous improvement.

• Develop reusable platform components, SDKs, libraries, and self-service capabilities that improve developer productivity across engineering teams.

• Support deployment and operations using K8s, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code practices.

• Build observability into streaming applications using metrics, logging, distributed tracing, dashboards, and proactive alerting.

• Monitor and troubleshoot production streaming systems using consumer lag, checkpoint health, logs, metrics, and operational dashboards.

• Partner closely with platform engineers, data engineers, ML engineers, analytics teams, and product teams to deliver end-to-end real-time data solutions.

• Build streaming pipelines that enable AI/ML platforms, online feature engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and intelligent applications.

• Participate in production support, incident response, root cause analysis, and continuous platform reliability improvements.

• Leverage AI-assisted software development tools to improve code quality, testing, debugging, documentation, and engineering productivity while maintaining strong software engineering practices.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building distributed systems and real-time streaming platforms.

• Strong hands-on experience with Apache Kafka or Redpanda, including:

  • Topics and partitions

  • Consumer groups

  • Replication

  • Delivery semantics

  • Producer and consumer tuning

  • Performance optimization

  • Production operations

• Strong experience building production applications using Apache Flink, including:

  • Stateful stream processing

  • Event time processing

  • Watermarks

  • Windowing

  • Checkpointing

  • Savepoints

  • Parallelism

  • Backpressure

  • Fault recovery

• Strong understanding of event-driven architectures and real-time streaming systems.

• Solid understanding of distributed systems including scalability, fault tolerance, consistency models, replication, and performance optimization.

• Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Java, Scala, Python, or Go.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, and system design.

• Experience building cloud-native applications using Docker and Kubernetes.

• Experience working with public cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.

• Experience debugging production issues across distributed applications and streaming infrastructure.

• Familiarity with REST APIs, gRPC, or event-driven service integration.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to work effectively across cross-

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience operating large-scale Apache Kafka and Apache Flink deployments in production.

• Experience with Kafka Connect, Debezium, or Change Data Capture (CDC) architectures.

• Experience designing schema-based event contracts using Avro, Protobuf, JSON Schema, and Schema Registry.

• Experience integrating streaming platforms with Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, ClickHouse, Apache Pinot, or similar analytical storage systems.

• Familiarity with Spark Structured Streaming or complementary stream processing technologies.

• Experience building real-time feature engineering pipelines supporting machine learning and AI applications.

• Experience with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, distributed tracing, and modern observability platforms.

• Experience using Terraform, Helm, or Infrastructure as Code practices.

• Experience building edge-to-cloud or vehicle-to-cloud streaming architectures.

• Experience participating in production incident response, postmortems, and operational excellence initiatives.

AI-Driven Engineering
At Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, we believe AI is transforming how software is built and operated. Engineers on this team are expected to thoughtfully leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate software design, implementation, testing, debugging, documentation, and operational excellence while maintaining high standards for code quality, security, and engineering judgment.

What Success Looks Like

• Delivers reliable, maintainable, and scalable streaming services that support mission critical operational, analytics, and AI workloads.

• Demonstrates growing ownership of production systems by proactively improving reliability, scalability, performance, and developer experience.

• Designs and implements streaming solutions that balance latency, throughput, resiliency, and operational simplicity.

• Collaborates effectively across platform, infrastructure, data engineering, AI/ML, and product teams to deliver high-impact solutions.

• Applies AI-assisted engineering practices to improve development velocity while maintaining strong software engineering standards.

• Contributes reusable platform capabilities that enable teams to build event-driven and AI powered applications efficiently.

• Continuously learns emerging technologies and contributes innovative ideas that advance Rivian's real time data platform and AI capabilities.

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.

Equal Opportunity

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information or characteristics, physical or mental disability, marital/domestic partner status, age, military/veteran status, medical condition, or any other characteristic protected by law. We are also committed to ensuring compliance with all applicable fair employment practice laws regarding citizenship and immigration status.

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies is committed to ensuring that our hiring process is accessible for persons with disabilities. If you have a disability or limitation, such as those covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, that requires accommodations to assist you in the search and application process, please email us at candidateaccommodations@rivian.com.

Candidate Data Privacy

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies” may collect, use and disclose your personal information or personal data (within the meaning of the applicable data protection laws) when you apply for employment and/or participate in our recruitment processes (“Candidate Personal Data”). This data includes contact, demographic, communications, educational, professional, employment, social media/website, network/device, recruiting system usage/interaction, security and preference information. Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies may use your Candidate Personal Data for the purposes of (i) tracking interactions with our recruiting system; (ii) carrying out, analyzing and improving our application and recruitment process, including assessing you and your application and conducting employment, background and reference checks; (iii) establishing an employment relationship or entering into an employment contract with you; (iv) complying with our legal, regulatory and corporate governance obligations; (v) record keeping; (vi) ensuring network and information security and preventing fraud; and (vii) as otherwise required or permitted by applicable law.

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies may share your Candidate Personal Data with (i) internal personnel who have a need to know such information in order to perform their duties, including individuals on our People Team, Finance, Legal, and the team(s) with the position(s) for which you are applying; (ii) Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies affiliates; and (iii) Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies’ service providers, including providers of background checks, staffing services, and cloud services.

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies may transfer or store internationally your Candidate Personal Data, including to or in the United States, Canada, and the European Union and in the cloud, and this data may be subject to the laws and accessible to the courts, law enforcement and national security authorities of such jurisdictions.

If you provide a mobile telephone number as part of your application or during the recruitment process, Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies may use that number to contact you via SMS text message for recruitment-related purposes, including scheduling, logistics, and status updates. Message and data rates may apply. You may opt out of SMS communications at any time by replying STOP to any text message you receive from us. Consent to receive SMS messages is not a condition of applying for or being considered for employment.

Please see our Candidate Data Privacy Notice (English)and Candidate Data Privacy Notice (Serbian) for more information.

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Please note this job posting represents an open, active vacancy. Additionally, we are not currently accepting applications from third party application services.