Staff Software Engineer - Identity Platform

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. 

Rivian's Identity Platform team builds the core systems that power authentication, authorization, and user lifecycle management across every customer-facing product Rivian ships — mobile, web, and vehicle software. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join a newly formed Serbia-based team as its senior technical anchor.
In this role, you will set technical direction, lead architecture decisions, and own the most complex engineering challenges on the platform. You will work closely with the Engineering Manager and Principal Architect to shape long-term strategy, elevate the team around you, and ensure the Serbia team takes full, confident ownership of a high-scale, security-critical platform.

Technical Leadership: Lead architecture decisions, author RFCs and ADRs, and drive the long-term evolution of the platform. Influence outcomes across the team and with cross-functional partners without relying on direct authority.
Backend Service Development: Design, implement, and maintain scalable backend microservices. Own complex features end-to-end — from design through implementation, testing, and production operation.
Security-First Engineering: Treat security as a first-class design constraint. Think in threat models, catch risks at the design stage, and establish patterns the team can apply consistently.
Cloud Infrastructure: Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code for cloud-managed resources including databases, caches, message queues, and event streaming services.
Observability & Reliability: Own production health of the services you build. Define SLOs, write structured logs, author runbooks, and participate in on-call rotation.
Team Elevation: Mentor and sponsor mid-level and senior engineers through design reviews, pairing, and honest feedback. You measure part of your own success by how much better the people around you get.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Security, Product, Data Privacy, and Infrastructure teams. Translate cross-functional requirements into well-designed, maintainable
technical solutions.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 7+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, with substantial time building and operating production systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in one of the following: Python, Go, or Java — and comfort picking up others.
• Solid understanding of authentication and authorization concepts: session management, tokens, MFA, and OAuth2/OIDC fundamentals.
• Solid understanding of REST API design, HTTP fundamentals, and service-to-service communication patterns.
• Hands-on experience with cloud services — databases, queues, caches, and serverless compute (AWS preferred).
• Experience deploying and operating services on container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
• Proven ability to lead technical discussions, author design documents, and drive decisions across teams.
• Strong debugging and observability skills — structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills.

Nice to have

• Experience building or operating customer identity and access management platforms at scale.
• Familiarity with fine-grained authorization concepts (e.g. ReBAC, ABAC, policy-based access control).
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tooling (e.g. Terraform, Pulumi, or similar).
• Familiarity with privacy-aware system design and the engineering implications of GDPR or CCPA.
• Prior involvement in a system ownership transition or platform migration.
• Background in automotive, IoT, or connected consumer product companies.

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.

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.