Senior Tech Lead Manager, Perception

Rivian Rivian · Auto · Palo Alto, CA · Autonomous Driving

This role focuses on owning, architecting, and delivering the strategy for large-scale, Lidar-free auto-labeling for Autonomous Vehicles. It involves the end-to-end ML lifecycle, including data acquisition, metrics, evaluation, optimization, and feedback loops, with a focus on shipping production-grade models and managing individual contributors. The domain is robotics, specifically within the AV perception stack.

What you'd actually do

  1. Own, architect, drive and deliver the overarching strategy for Lidar-free auto-labeling at large scale. This scope includes AV mapping, lanes auto-labelling, object auto-labelling and scaling.
  2. Ship production-grade, scalable auto-labeling models.
  3. Have a holistic understanding of the entire AV perception stack and work with the teams to define how we measure and monitor performance of the auto-labeling system.
  4. Work with the team to drive progress in improving the performance.
  5. Establish rigorous evaluation and monitoring benchmarks.

Skills

Required

  • BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Robotics, Electrical Engineering, or a highly related quantitative field.
  • 7+ years of professional experience scaling ML solutions
  • Proven track record of hands-on experience delivering an auto-labeling system for Autonomous Vehicles at scale.
  • Experience with owning, driving and delivering an auto-labeling strategy for AV.
  • Holistic understanding of the entire AV perception stack.
  • Strong proficiency in Python
  • Solid understanding of modern Perception pipelines, benchmarking tools, and infrastructure.
  • Demonstrated ability to drive progress across a complex system spanning multiple domains and components, across a distributed, cross-functional stack in a fast-paced environment.
  • Experience managing software, robotics and/or machine learning teams.

Nice to have

  • Strong experience in Lidar-free lane auto-labeling
  • Strong experience in mapping, especially from multiple vehicle passes
  • Experience in driving training data strategy, including defining data annotation guidelines, partnering effectively with in-house and external 3P annotation vendors.
  • Experience with multiple modalities (e.g., cameras, LiDAR, Radar).
  • Experience with onboard edge deployment, cloud inference architectures, and balancing compute/efficiency trade-offs.
  • Experience with quantization techniques (PTQ, QAT) and high-performance inference engines like TensorRT.

What the JD emphasized

  • Lidar-free auto-labeling at large scale
  • ship production-grade models
  • end-to-end ML lifecycle
  • managing individual contributors (IC)

Other signals

  • shipping production-grade models
  • ML lifecycle ownership
  • managing ML teams