Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Platform

Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies is a joint venture building software-defined vehicle technologies. The Parallax Cloud team develops the communication fabric for live state exchange between vehicles, mobile apps, and cloud services. As a Senior Software Engineer, you will design, build, and operate cloud services and APIs, manage high-throughput messaging with NATS, and own services end-to-end using Kubernetes and GitOps.

• Design, build, and operate cloud services and gRPC/Protobuf APIs that let product teams read vehicle state, subscribe to changes, and send commands.
• Operate and tune NATS, our high-performance messaging system, including configuration, upgrades, troubleshooting, performance validation, and capacity planning.
• Own services end to end, from implementation through deployment and production operation, using Kubernetes, GitOps/Argo CD, and infrastructure as code.
• Diagnose production behavior using metrics, traces, logs, dashboards, and alerts.
• Design, operate, and tune service networking, load balancers, and L4/L7 traffic routing.
• Develop and run end-to-end, integration, and load tests to catch functional and performance regressions before production.

• At least 5 years of software engineering experience focused on distributed systems, high-scale backend services, or streaming and messaging platforms.
• Strong proficiency in at least one general-purpose programming language and willingness to work primarily in Go, with occasional work in Java and TypeScript client SDKs.
• Practical experience building and operating production services, including observability and troubleshooting.
• Solid foundations in API design, networking, concurrency, and distributed systems with working knowledge of Kubernetes.
• Hands-on experience with high-throughput messaging systems such as NATS, Kafka, or MQTT.
• Experience with Kubernetes and owning service deployments; familiarity with GitOps/Argo CD and infrastructure as code.
• Strong knowledge of HTTP/2, TCP, L4/L7 load balancing along with experience operating gRPC services in production is a major plus.
• Familiarity with mTLS, certificates, service identity, secure transport and authentication patterns.
• Track record of maintaining or making contributions to established open-source projects.

• Competitive base salary
• Annual company performance bonus program (discretionary)
• Equity in the form of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
• Health coverage
• Retirement savings
• Time off
• Family planning programs