Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Perception

Role Summary

You will be a key member of the Perception team at Rivian, which develops advanced machine learning algorithms that directly impact safety critical self-driving features of our category defining vehicles.

Responsibilities

As a member of the Autonomy team, you will guide the architecture, implementation, and deployment of foundation models that act as learned world models. These models will support not only perception tasks (e.g., object detection, scene understanding) but also downstream decision-making and closed-loop autonomy.

.Key areas of responsibility include:

• Developing technical strategy and architecture for foundation models as unified world models
• Developing multi-modal, multi-task transformer-based systems that support closed-loop autonomy
• Building training and evaluation pipelines at scale across petabytes of real-world and simulated driving data
• Collaborating with cross-functional teams across perception, planning, simulation, and ML infrastructure
• Driving alignment between model capabilities and real-world deployment constraints (latency, robustness, validation)
• Publishing internal technical guidance and mentoring engineers across autonomy ML

Qualifications

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Robotics, or a related field
• 7+ years of experience building and deploying large-scale ML systems
• Deep understanding of foundation models, self-supervised learning, and world models in robotics or simulation
• Strong software engineering background, with fluency in Python and C++
• Experience training and evaluating transformer models or end-to-end autonomous agents
• Familiarity with real-time inference systems and autonomous vehicle constraints
• Proven leadership in driving ML projects from research to production

Bonus:

• Prior work on end-to-end autonomous driving architectures (e.g., imitation learning, behavior cloning, world models)
• Experience with sensor fusion (LiDAR, camera, radar) in a learned model