A week after reporting its financial results for the second quarter, EV maker Rivian has announced on Monday that it has appointed two new Vice Presidents to its team.
According to a new LinkedIn post by Chief Operations Officer Javier Varela, the company is promoting long-time Rivian engineer Brian Gase to VP of Engineering Quality and has hired car industry veteran Omar Rivera as VP of Corporate Quality.
Brian Gase, a former Senior Director of Validation, Engineering Quality and Special Projects, to VP of Engineering Quality, joined Rivian in its early days (2010) as a Lead Body Engineer.
Five years later, Gase was promoted to Director of Body — a role in which he stayed for two years. After several other positions, Rivian’s new VP became last year Senior Director of Validation, Engineering Quality and Special Projects.
The engineer had previously worked as a Closures Engineer at the Detroit automaker Ford.
Omar Rivera, who joined Rivian on August 1, has served at Hyundai’s luxury brand Genesis over the last four years as an Executive Director.
Before moving to the South Korean brand, Rivera was the Head of After Sales Operations for the EV start-up Faraday Future for over a year, after serving as Director, Global Service Operations in Tesla for nearly three years.
The industry veteran joined the industry 30 years ago in Detroit automakers Ford and GM. He was a Lead Engineer in Ford from 2000 to 2003.
Gase and Rivera join Krishna Bandaru, who was hired by the Irvine-based EV maker in late 2024 as the VP of Manufacturing Engineering.
A few months earlier, the company had appointed Google veteran Sangsoo S. as its new Vice President of Infotainment Software, under the leadership of Chief Software Officer Wassym Bensaid.
Rivian is preparing to begin the public release of its latest vehicle software, version 2025.26, about a month after its previous update, which added Google Maps integration to its navigation system.
Earlier this year, Rivian promoted Marina Hoffmann from VP and Head of Communications to Chief Communications Officer. Hoffman was a former Meta employee who joined the EV maker in late 2022.
Read Javier Varela’s full LinkedIn post below:
“At Rivian, we are focused on building the best quality vehicles for our customers.
To that end, we are expanding our quality organization with the addition of longtime Rivian leader Brian Gase, who is renowned for his passion about our vehicles and our company.
Brian is moving into the role of VP, Engineering Quality.
In addition, we are proud to welcome Omar Rivera to Rivian as VP, Corporate Quality. Omar has 30+ years of automotive expertise, most recently as Executive Director of Quality and Service Engineering for Hyundai.
I’m looking forward to working closely with both of them!”
