Sr. Thermal Development and Calibration Engineer

About Rivian Rivian is on a mission to keep the world adventurous forever. This goes for the emissions-free Electric Adventure Vehicles we build, and the curious, courageous souls we seek to attract. As a company, we constantly challenge what’s possible, never simply accepting what has always been done. We reframe old problems, seek new solutions and operate comfortably in areas that are unknown. Our backgrounds are diverse, but our team shares a love of the outdoors and a desire to protect it for future generations.

Summary The Senior Thermal Development and Calibration Engineer is responsible for developing, calibrating, validating, and launching vehicle-level climate comfort features from early definition through production sign-off. This role sits at the intersection of feature definition, controls strategy, calibration maturity, and cross-functional launch execution. This engineer is expected to translate customer and attribute intent into actionable feature requirements, operating logic, validation plans, and calibration deliverables that can be implemented across vehicle, software, and thermal subsystem teams. A high level of technical judgment, climate comfort intuition, and cross-functional leadership is required to ensure feature performance is achieved at launch. The role is especially focused on vehicle climate comfort behavior across real customer conditions, including hot soak, cold drive-off, steady-state comfort, transient comfort response, and system behavior under edge-case or arbitration scenarios. This engineer should have a strong understanding of how HVAC hardware, thermal systems, controls, software, and user experience all come together to deliver a high-quality customer climate experience. Responsibilities ● Support vehicle-level climate comfort feature development from concept through launch readiness and post-SOP improvement ● Define feature use cases, operating states, triggers, inhibits, fallback behavior, and customer-facing acceptance criteria ● Translate climate comfort intent into clear cross-functional requirements for vehicle systems, software, calibration, and subsystem teams ● Develop calibration strategies and tuning plans for HVAC and thermal comfort features across program milestones ● Lead calibration maturation for vehicle features across mule, lab car, chamber, road load, and program builds ● Create and maintain validation plans, DVP inputs, test procedures, and pass/fail criteria aligned to feature requirements and program milestones ● Plan and execute vehicle-level testing for climate comfort features in chamber, road, and extreme environment conditions ● Analyze test data, identify gaps to target, and drive issue triage, root cause, and closure across software, systems, and thermal teams ● Work directly with Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies System Software and implementation teams to define detailed feature logic, calibration hooks / parameters, diagnostics, and observability needs ● Partner with Aerothermal / attribute teams to align comfort targets, ambient assumptions, success criteria, and performance sign-off expectations ● Interface with Thermal / Refrigeration subsystem teams on requested evaporator / airflow / compressor operating targets and required validation conditions for feature success ● Collaborate with UI/UX teams to ensure settings behavior, alerts, messaging, and customer controls support the intended feature experience ● Drive readiness reviews using milestone-based KPI tracking for requirement maturity, calibration maturity, validation completion, issue closure, and launch risk ● Clearly communicate results, open issues, risks, and recommendation paths to engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders ● Support post-launch issue resolution, OTA improvement opportunities, and incorporation of field learnings into future feature updates Qualifications ● Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering,