Senior Platform Engineer, Data Platforms

Rivian is on a mission to keep the world adventurous forever. This goes for the emissions-free Electric Adventure Vehicles we build, and the curious, courageous souls we seek to attract.

As a company, we constantly challenge what’s possible, never simply accepting what has always been done. We reframe old problems, seek new solutions and operate comfortably in areas that are unknown. Our backgrounds are diverse, but our team shares a love of the outdoors and a desire to protect it for future generations.

Role Summary

We are looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to own the infrastructure, automation, security, and reliability of Rivian’s Data Platform, built on Databricks and AWS. This is a platform and DevOps role at its core: you will treat our data platform as a product, providing data engineers, analysts, and data scientists with a secure, well-governed, observable, and cost-efficient environment where they can move fast without breaking things.

You will define and manage the platform as code with Terraform, harden its security posture, build the CI/CD and deployment patterns the rest of the team relies on, and establish the monitoring and observability needed to keep the platform healthy at scale. We value a platform mindset of someone who looks at every solution and asks: “How do we make this more scalable, more secure, more automated, and more self-service?”

We don’t believe in manual drudgery. Our team stays ahead of the curve by integrating the world’s most advanced AI tools into our daily workflows. You will have full access to Gemini, Claude and Devin to accelerate architecture design, automate boilerplate, and focus your energy on solving complex platform challenges.

Responsibilities

• Databricks Platform Ownership: Administer, tune, and evolve our Databricks Lakehouse environment workspace configuration, compute policies, serverless and classic compute, Unity Catalog, Lakeflow, and Databricks Asset Bundles (DABs), ensuring it is performant, reliable, and seamlessly integrated with the wider ecosystem.

• Infrastructure as Code: Design and manage the platform’s AWS and Databricks infrastructure with Terraform, ensuring every workspace, catalog, policy, and integration is reproducible, version-controlled, and deployed through automated pipelines rather than manual changes.

• Platform Security & Governance: Own the data platform's security posture, including IAM roles and least-privilege access, SSO/SCIM identity management, secrets management, network isolation and private connectivity, encryption, and audit logging. Configure and manage enterprise data governance, lineage, and metadata through Unity Catalog so our data remains a trusted asset.

• Observability & Monitoring: Build and maintain platform observability, monitoring, alerting, and dashboards for pipeline health, job SLAs, cluster utilization, query performance, and platform costs, using Databricks system tables and our monitoring stack, so issues are caught before users notice them.

• CI/CD & Developer Experience: Design GitLab CI/CD pipelines, DAB deployment patterns, and paved-road templates that let data engineers ship pipelines and dbt models to production safely and quickly. Champion testing, code review, and environment promotion standards.

• Reliability & Cost Optimization: Drive capacity planning, incident response, and root-cause analysis for platform issues. Continuously optimize compute configurations and workloads for performance and cost (FinOps).

• Architectural Influence: Act as a technical consultant within the team, proactively propose infrastructure improvements, evaluate new Databricks and AWS capabilities, and keep our stack at the cutting edge.

• Collaborative Engineering: Partner with data engineers and data scientists building in Python, SQL, and dbt, supporting orchestration via Databricks Workflows and Managed Airflow, and ingestion via Lakeflow and Fivetran to translate their needs into robust platform capabilities.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in platform, DevOps, cloud, or data infrastructure engineering, including significant hands-on experience operating production data platforms.

• Deep, hands-on expertise with the Databricks ecosystem: workspace and account administration, Unity Catalog, compute/cluster policies, Databricks Asset Bundles, Lakeflow, Databricks Workflows, and system tables. Other DWH/DataLake/Data Lakehouse platforms experience will be considered a solid asset.

• Strong experience with AWS infrastructure and services (IAM, S3, VPC/networking, ECS, Lambda) and securing cloud environments or other cloud providers' equivalents..

• Proven proficiency with Terraform or CloudFormation for infrastructure as code, ideally including the Databricks Terraform provider, with a strong grasp of module design, state management, and automated plan/apply workflows.

• Solid programming skills in Python and expert-level SQL for automation, tooling, and platform diagnostics.

• Practical knowledge of platform security: least-privilege IAM, secrets management, SSO/SCIM, network isolation, encryption, and audit/compliance requirements.

• Experience implementing observability and monitoring for data platform metrics, logging, alerting, SLAs, and cost monitoring.

• Working knowledge of dbt and modern ELT patterns, and experience supporting orchestration with Managed Airflow or Databricks Workflows.

• Experience building CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI/CD preferred) for infrastructure and data workloads.

• A platform mindset: a track record of proposing and implementing improvements that made systems more scalable, secure, and self-service.

Nice to have:

• Fivetran or similar managed ingestion tools,

• data quality and monitoring frameworks,

• Databricks or AWS certifications, and

• FinOps practices for data platforms.

Equal Opportunity

Rivian is an equal opportunity employer and complies with all applicable federal, state, and local fair employment practices laws. 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.

Rivian 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 [email protected].

Candidate Data Privacy and Technology

Rivian 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 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) recordkeeping; (vi) ensuring network and information security and preventing fraud; and (vii) as otherwise required or permitted by applicable law.

Rivian 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 affiliates; and (iii) Rivian’s service providers, including providers of background checks, staffing services, and cloud services.

Rivian may transfer or store internationally your Candidate Personal Data, including to or in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, 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.

How We Use AI in Our Hiring Process: To ensure transparency, we want candidates to know that Rivian uses iCIMS Talent Cloud Artificial Intelligence (TCAI) and AI-enabled tools to assist with screening, reviewing, organizing and highlighting profiles and applications that match the key requirements for each role.

AI does not make hiring decisions: Qualified candidate applications are reviewed by a member of our team, and all decisions throughout the process are made by humans. We use AI to support efficiency and consistency, not to replace human judgment. We are committed to a fair, thoughtful, and equitable experience for every candidate.

Participation in AI profile matching is entirely voluntary. If you prefer that your profile not be used in this process, you can opt out at any time. Opting out means your profile will be excluded from automated matching and will not be surfaced for additional roles through this system. Your current application remains active and will not be affected in any way.

Please note that we are currently not accepting applications from third party application services.