Staff Software Engineer, Vehicle Configuration Platform

About UsRivian 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 SummaryA single firmware release must serve every vehicle variant we build across both Rivian and all Volkswagen brands. The vehicle configuration platform that the OTA team supports makes that possible: a schema-driven system that defines every configurable attribute of a vehicle and provisions them onto vehicles in the factory, in service, and over the air customer updates. Getting this wrong can mean anything from the wrong information showing on the driver display to a car that needs to be towed in for service. You will be a technical leader on the team that owns this platform, working as a peer to its lead architect. Where the architect drives the structural evolution of the configuration system itself, you will own the health, reliability, and scalability of everything around it: the compilation and code generation pipelines, the validation and release infrastructure, the provisioning path from schema to vehicle, and the developer experience of every engineer who touches configuration. You will set technical direction for this surface area, drive initiatives that span firmware, build infrastructure, release engineering, OTA, and factory integration across two companies' engineering organizations, and raise the bar for how the team designs, reviews, and ships. This role is based in our Berlin office and requires a minimum of three days per week onsite, with occasional travel to other company and partner sites as needed.  ResponsibilitiesOwn the technical direction for configuration tooling, validation, and delivery infrastructure, translating platform architecture into a concrete, sequenced roadmap and driving it to completion across teams. Lead initiatives that simplify the platform: consolidating redundant mechanisms, retiring legacy pathways, and reducing the coordination cost of routine changes, while every downstream consumer keeps working. Design the compatibility strategy for data contracts deployed to devices in the field, and build the automated enforcement that makes schema evolution provably safe rather than carefully reviewed. Architect the validation and release pipeline as a product: define what classes of defects must be impossible to merge, and build the layered checks, staged rollouts, and observability that get there. Serve as the senior escalation point for production configuration issues, leading root cause analysis during launches and field events and converting each incident into systemic prevention. Drive alignment across organizational boundaries, negotiating shared contracts, review processes, and release mechanics with firmware, cloud, diagnostics, manufacturing, and partner-brand stakeholders who have differing constraints and conventions. Mentor and multiply the engineers on the team, setting standards through design review, raising the quality of technical writing and decision records, and growing the mid-level engineers toward ownership. Be accountable for the long-term maintenance cost of what the team ships.  QualificationsMinimum Qualifications: 8+ years of software engineering experience, including demonstrated ownership of a platform, infrastructure, or developer-facing system used by many teams. A track record of leading cross-team technical initiatives from proposal through delivery, including ones that required deprecating or migrating away from entr