Pros
Passionate and like-minded people working for sustainability and clean energy. Rivian attracts top talent and has a lot of potential to succeed in the automotive industry. It's refreshing to be in an innovative company at the forefront of technology while building not only a vehicle but an entire platform/brand. Company culture is heavily emphasized by the CEO who has set a good example for the rest.
Kontras
For a startup, the benefits are subpar. Even with an entire team dedicated to improving benefits and putting a plan around equity, we still have seen nothing for a year now. They are very stingy on handing out company shares and equity is continuously diluted. The lack of a RSU refresh program is disheartening and incentive to stay is definitely not strong for high performers. Many employees who started early (before the Amazon partnership) took on a lot more risk and helped build the foundation of Rivian but people who joined later seem to receive similar compensation. How is that fair? For the amount of funding we have from investors, it's extremely surprising that they refuse to provide a decent lunch to everyone especially when the days are long and people work very hard, a lot of times through lunch. Instead they came up with a terrible subsidized food truck program that was supposed to provide "world class healthy food choices".... an absolute disaster and rather insulting actually Overall, it's a start up environment and we all want to see Rivian succeed so we put in all our time and energy to build the company together. However, it doesn't feel very rewarding to many of us. Instead, it's starting to seem that the company would nickel and dime the employees while leadership reaps the benefits