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Salary: USD 213,000 - 266,300 / annual
Rivian Autonomy is seeking an AI Data Operations Lead to lead the people and processes that transform vehicle data into reliable training and evaluation datasets for autonomous driving models. This is a leadership role within the AI Platform organization, responsible for overseeing labeling delivery, data quality, curation, and human review workflows.
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead and develop the AI data operations organization, setting operating plans and defining responsibilities across internal teams, contractors, and vendors
- Build capacity plans accounting for annotation, quality review, and rework across concurrent programs
- Translate model training and evaluation needs into labeling specifications, reviewer guidance, delivery milestones, and acceptance criteria
- Own operational checks ensuring collected vehicle data is ready for curation and labeling; partner with collection and engineering teams to resolve sensor, calibration, and data-quality issues
- Manage vendor performance and spend, setting service levels and quality expectations, evaluating suppliers, and managing capacity, pricing, and budgets
- Develop human evaluation and triage operations to investigate driving events, classify failures, and assemble evidence for root-cause analysis
- Establish shared operational metrics (accepted-data volume, quality, turnaround time, backlog, rework, collection yield, cost) to identify constraints and make delivery commitments
- Partner with Data Infrastructure, Eval Infrastructure, and Applied General AI to improve labeling tools, prelabels, automated quality checks, and assisted triage
- Work closely with Perception, Planning, Data Infrastructure, Eval Infrastructure, and Product teams to translate priorities into operational plans and provide evidence for release decisions
The ideal candidate will develop managers and specialists, make clear tradeoffs when demand exceeds capacity, and build an operation that improves as models, tools, and vehicle fleet evolve.
Requirements:
- 10+ years leading operations, including at least 5 years supporting autonomous vehicles, robotics, or complex machine-learning programs, with responsibility for budgets or P&L
- Experience managing annotation partners across domestic and international locations, including commercial negotiations, staffing plans, and service delivery
- Technical depth in AI development sufficient to discuss data requirements and failure analysis with engineers and translate discussions into clear operational work
- Proven record of developing managers and specialists, establishing ownership, and adapting team structures as priorities change
- Strong analytical judgment to separate quality problems from capacity or tooling problems, test causes, and follow through on fixes
- Clear communication across engineering, product, finance, and operations with ability to make prioritization decisions and explain their impact on delivery
Bonus:
- Direct experience supporting autonomous driving or other physical AI systems through data production and evaluation
- Experience applying large language models, multimodal models, or generative AI to annotation and human-review workflows
