Rivian announced on Thursday that it is cutting 600 jobs, marking its fifth layoff in just two years.
In an internal email sent to employees, the company’s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe justified the measure, while adding that he will temporarily be overseeing the Marketing team.
“With the launch of R2 in front of us and the need to profitably scale our business, we have made the very difficult decision to make a number of structural adjustments to our teams,” the chief executive stated.
The job cuts affected “roughly 4.5%” of Rivian‘s workforce.
Bloomberg reported on Thursday, citing an internal source, that the layoffs would affect mostly commercial roles across servicing and sales departments.
“To ensure we move forward with clarity, I want to summarize the areas most impacted,” Scaringe said.
Rivian is “streamlining the customer journey” by integrating Vehicle Operations into the Service organization, and merging Delivery and Mobile Operations with Sales, reducing handoffs and ensuring a “seamless” customer touchpoint from purchase to delivery.
At the same time, Scaringe noted that Rivian has “historically” had multiple functions “collectively capture what would typically be housed in a single marketing organization.”
Hence, the company is now recruiting its first Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). However, the post will be immediately created, as the CEO will now act as “interim CMO” until then.
“Our Marketing Experiences team, led by Denise Cherry, and the Creative Studio team, led by Matt Soldan, will both report directly to me for now,” Scaringe added.
Rivian says “these changes are being made to ensure we can deliver on our potential by scaling efficiently towards building a healthy and profitable business.”
The CEO reaffirmed on Thursday that he is “incredibly confident in R2 and the hard work of our teams to deliver and ramp this incredible product.”
The EV maker has a record industry-wide cumulative loss of over $22 billion, as it moves into the launch of its more affordable vehicle.
The EV maker’s outlook hinges increasingly on the successful execution and timely ramp of its forthcoming R2 model, which is planned to begin deliveries in the first half of 2026.
In early September, Rivian announced another round of layoffs, stating that it affected “less than 1.5%” of its total workforce across both the US and Canada.
In June, the company also laid off about 140 employees, citing process inefficiencies.
In 2024, it had eliminated about 11% of its workforce in two different circumstances (first in February, then in April).
In previous layoff rounds, the company said affected employees are eligible for rehire and encouraged to apply for open positions.
The upcoming CMO will join a list of C-level executives, which includes Chief Financial Officer Claire McDonough, Chief Operating Officer Javier Varela, among others.
Earlier this year, Rivian promoted Marina Hoffmann from VP and Head of Communications to Chief Communications Officer.
In August, the EV maker reassigned senior executive Michael Callahan to the role of Chief Accounting Officer — previously, he served the roles of Chief Legal Officer and Chief Administrative Officer.
Over the past months, the company has introduced several Vice Presidents to its management team.
Rivian has hired Erica Zoromski as its new VP of Employee Experience, under the direction of Chief People Officer R. Scott Griffin.
The Irvine-based EV maker has recently hired car industry veteran Omar Rivera as VP of Corporate Quality, and promoted long-time Rivian engineer Brian Gase to VP of Engineering Quality.
CFO Claire McDonough said in a LinkedIn post last month that the EV maker has also appointed Chip Newcom as VP of Investor Relations.
