Staff Site Reliability Engineer – Production Operations

About the role

We are seeking a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to lead Production Operations (ProdOps) for a joint venture between Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies. This senior, hybrid role combines technical direction, hands‑on incident response, and team leadership to ensure the reliability of our cloud, vehicle development pipelines, and product security ecosystems.

Key responsibilities

• Coordinate and communicate during major incidents, acting as the central nervous system for cross‑functional response.
• Maintain a high‑level mental model of the entire production ecosystem spanning cloud services, vehicle pipelines, and security.
• Facilitate blameless post‑incident reviews using Learning From Incidents (LFI) and HOWIE‑style reporting.
• Surface and prioritize systemic weaknesses in observability, testing, tooling, and processes.
• Own the reliability feedback loop end‑to‑end, driving action‑item backlogs with TPMs and development teams.
• Lead, mentor, and grow a small team of exceptional engineers as the function scales.

Required profile

• Senior systems engineer with a strong coding background.
• Think in terms of systems and failure modes rather than single root causes.
• Proven ability to lead incident response while still contributing technically.
• Experience building automation‑first reliability practices.
• Excellent communication skills for executive and stakeholder updates.

Required skills

• Cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Automation and scripting (e.g., Python, Bash)
• Incident management and coordination
• Observability tooling (metrics, tracing, logging)
• Post‑incident analysis methodologies (LFI, HOWIE)