What is the hiring process like at Rivian?

The company paid well, “pizza parties”

During my time at Rivian, I consistently saw a disconnect between what senior leadership said and how they actually operated. When I joined, management emphasized that they had our long‑term career growth in mind. In practice, this turned out not to be true. Any time promotions or internal mobility were brought up, we were told to look outside the team and to personally bring a hiring manager to leadership if we wanted support. Despite repeated attempts, no meaningful help was ever provided. It became clear that there was an unofficial freeze on internal movement within the team, even though this was never communicated transparently. The broader culture felt transactional — as soon as an employee became even a minor inconvenience, they were treated as expendable. This created an environment where trust and psychological safety were hard to maintain. Ultimately, I’m relieved to no longer be in that position. The experience taught me a lot about the importance of leadership accountability and genuine career development support, neither of which I found at Rivian.

Pays well, some opportunity for overtime, good paid time off

Not enough employees for the work, not enough hiring of new employees, little mobility for base level employees

I guess it’s better than starving.

Let’s start with their employee parking lots. They have several, but none very big that are near the plant. Any spaces closer to the plant are reserved for management and office workers. Parking is typically highly competitive. If all the spaces are filled, you have to drive to their perpetually temporary spillover lot and take a bus in. It’s like going to the airport - plan on arriving two hours early. End of shift is just as much fun, standing outside in freezing January or sweltering July waiting your turn to squeeze through one of two turnstiles along with hundreds of your co-workers. To boot, heavy truck traffic has torn up College Avenue so bad, you feel as if you’re driving in a war-torn country. Did I mention it can be nearly a mile walk just to get in? On to the (mis)management. Most of them never worked in manufacturing. Perhaps trying to project a cool California vibe, Rivian hired mostly younger Tesla rejects and Taco Bell assistant managers to run the place. You’re never really sure who’s in charge or who can boss you around. They do NOT have an HR dept. they have “People Partners” whose sole function appears to be firing employees for everything other than blatant drug abuse. It’s okay to sell drugs or get high at break times - or whenever you can sneak some vaping in one of the restrooms. Three of the Group Leads I’ve worked under were fired for sexual harassment. Can’t blame the GL’s too much though as some are basically right out of high school, and Rivian’s onboarding doesn’t include sexual harassment training. They have a ton of “required” online courses they don’t give you any time to take. Instead, they try to scare you into doing them on your own time by notifying you this or that needs to be completed by a certain date. Quite a diverse workforce. You either have a very hard job or a very easy one, all depending on whether you’re buddies with your GL. A lot of the workforce have bs medical restrictions, so if you’re healthy and honest, you’ll be doing all their hard work as they flirt, text and play on their smartphones all day. At 61, I do a lot more work than my 20-something team members. Rivian changes their shift times, schedules and policies whenever it suits them. They constantly tout work/life balance, but it’s just a recruitment tool. They only care about making up for the shortcomings of management. It’s not a very safe environment. Fork lifts, golf carts, etc. have right-of-way, and there are hundreds of them buzzing around at top speed - honking, cussing and berating you for not using some convoluted pedestrian pathway that adds 250 steps in your long, arduous quest for an available restroom. Tripping hazards everywhere - even on the assembly lines. Their ergonomics people won’t do a darn thing to make your job less strenuous; apparently just having an ergonomics team is enough to make us think they care. Rivian’s latest re-tooling has created an excess of team members. The company if firing people as much as it can. Team members are on eggshells as a vast army of foreign engineers speaking broken English and laptop-toting geeks videotape your line for weeks with the sole purpose of eliminating jobs and distributing the work. Bottom line, You’d probably feel safer and better treated at a Vietnamese Nike factory. We have been promised raises for over a year now. Rivian’s managed to weasel a billion or so from the state of Illinois, another $1-5 billion from VW, and our founder has a net worth in the billions - but, hey the rest of us need to economize. Terrible company to work for

Team members cohesiveness and collaboration is great.

Constant adding of new processes (in the name of Management’s directive) causing more work and reduce efficiency. Many new process were set up to facilitate reporting and not considering the resources needed to support. It just keep piling up, lost the efficiency, just kept talking about the problem.

The great thing about Rivian is that you are able to collaborate with great talent and make good connections. Compensation is good (Base salary, bonus, stock based on company's performance) I was within the first 5000 people when I started at Rivian, at that time it was the best culture I ever experience out, the main values where intact - compass values), but it got really deteriorated with time and those values where not important in the company any more.

Many redundant processes, there is a JIRA project for every workstream in the company, it became really bureaucratic environment, the release process was incredible complex and lengthy, there were more checkers than enablers, there are some teams that feel entitled of things outside of their umbrella of responsibilities and they only held up and delay the processes (i.e. NPI, Manufacturing) the worse part of it is that this was escalated multiple times to upper management and they recognized that was a problem but they did not do anything. Terrible management decisions, to many resources were wasted due to cancellation of multiple programs (millions of dollars), I counted 6 at least. The company leaders are not aligned with the priorities of the company, even the top head... key top priority was cost reduction and there were multiple product decisions taken picking the most expensive solution. The product plan and content complexity is the most complicated I ever seen in my entire career, no pragmatism or common sense... In the manufacturing plan is a disaster, no control or process is followed, nobody follows work instructions, control plan, PFMEA, etc. Useless layers of people in the Vehicle Program Team that their only function is to track a workstream and do not add any value. Moving targets, unrealistic objectives, ridiculous timings.... ufff, and so much more...

Best job I have ever had, you are challenged every day and work with great people. You work in an environment that values the technical work output. Amazing product.

Plagued by internal politics. Lots of empire building that leads to crazy waves of uncontrolled hiring, followed by firing. You will never feel safe in your employment here. Everybody has seen amazing engineers fired because their roles were no longer critical to achieve the constantly changing strategic company direction. This company is world class at burning cash. There is insane waste everywhere. They also took on too many projects at once and abandoning them frequently. Our next car has already been years in the making and even now I am not confident that the design/ specs won't change again. A lot of leaders at VP level are utterly useless. After recent layoffs I the teams have been gutted so hard that I foresee a lot of dysfunction in the coming months.

Good team organization and structure Good salary and advancement potential

Contracter budget is tight FTE hiring is strict and difficult

the people are amazing, ability to network daily, develop multitasking and process building skills. usually sticks to an 8 hr shift, so work/life balance is good.

overworked sometimes, little to no growth in service department, promoted based off of the team versus individually, large turn around rate in advisors/ managers, little training.

The work itself was interesting, meaningful, and impactful. Great chance to be part of Rivian’s autonomy and AI development efforts. Our team was able to provide feedback and ideas that helped improve the annotation process — and many of those suggestions were implemented. Most of the people I worked with were passionate, supportive, and genuinely invested in the mission. The tools and systems we used (Segments AI, Slack, Zoom) made the job easy to collaborate on remotely.

We were told the project was temporary with the possibility of extension, but that turned out to mean temporary, period. After helping build and refine the annotation system, our group was told the roles were ending because Rivian needed us back at the main plant for the R2 ramp-up. However, none of us are actually returning to R2 work — we’re just being placed back into our old jobs, with only the option to apply and interview for R2 later. Shortly after that decision, around 20 contractors were hired in Palo Alto, CA to take over the same work we had been doing. Considering the higher costs of that region, it’s hard to see how that was a cost-saving decision. The lack of transparency and communication made it feel like internal employees were used to help launch a new program and then replaced once it was running smoothly.

It was fun at first but became toxic very quickly as poor hiring decision made life more and more difficult.

No accountability for certain demographics. Buddies hiring their buddies, HR will ignore toxic and illegal behavior. Forced travel beyond contract, forced to work on PTO and skip breaks. I once clocked 36 hours because they forgot to put a backup in my place and I was traveling. Honestly no one their cares about what happens. It's very Amazon...