Rivian reported 15,232 employees at the end of 2025 in its annual 10-K filing — a 2.5% increase from a year earlier and the company’s first net headcount gain at the consolidated-entity level since 2023.
Throughout 2025, the EV maker founded and led by RJ Scaringe executed three rounds of layoffs.
The figure includes employees of the Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies joint venture — known as RV Tech — which Rivian consolidates for accounting purposes, Rivian said in the filing.
The consolidation raises the complexity of the analysis.
RV Tech was capitalized in November 2024 and has expanded its own headcount throughout 2025, drawing personnel from both Rivian and Volkswagen Group under dual or migrated roles.
Because Rivian does not separately disclose RV Tech’s standalone headcount, it is not possible to determine from public filings whether the Rivian brand’s own workforce — excluding the joint venture — grew, held steady, or continued to shrink in 2025.
Monday’s disclosure punctuates a five-year arc that has seen Rivian‘s reported workforce expand from 10,422 at the end of its November 2021 initial public offering to a peak of 16,790 at the end of 2023.
The company then contracted by a net 1,558 employees over the following two years as the company sought to reach gross-profit positive ahead of this year’s launch of its cheapest model ever, the R2.
Layoffs and Hires
Rivian executed three publicly disclosed workforce reductions during 2025: a roughly 1% cut in late June affecting around 140 manufacturing employees, an approximately 1.5% cut in early September affecting around 150 commercial-team employees, and a 4.5% reduction announced in October affecting more than 600 employees across marketing, vehicle operations, sales and delivery, and mobile operations.
The combined cuts removed roughly 890 to 900 positions during 2025.
For the consolidated entity to nonetheless end the year with 371 more employees than it started, Rivian and the joint venture together added roughly 1,260 to 1,270 net new positions in other functions during the year.
How that gross hiring divides between Rivian‘s standalone operations — including R2 manufacturing ramp at the Normal, Illinois plant, software and artificial-intelligence engineering, and core vehicle programs — and the consolidated joint venture’s expansion is not disclosed.
If RV Tech grew significantly during 2025 — a plausible interpretation given the joint venture was newly formed in November 2024 and has publicly added at least six senior executives during the year, including Vice President of AI and Data Manasi Vartak earlier this month — then a meaningful portion of the consolidated +371 net gain may reflect joint-venture growth rather than Rivian brand hiring.
Under that scenario, Rivian‘s standalone headcount could have continued to decline in 2025 even as the consolidated total rose.
Rivian does not break out hiring by entity or function in its annual filings.
Industry Context
While Rivian does not compete with the major Chinese EV manufacturers in any common end market, its 2025 net hiring stands apart from the workforce trajectories disclosed by peers globally.
BYD Inc., the world’s largest new-energy-vehicle manufacturer, cut its workforce by approximately 100,000 employees in 2025, ending the year with roughly 870,000 staff, as EV reported.
The 10.2% reduction marked BYD‘s first major headcount decline and was driven by automation rather than weakening demand — vehicle sales rose to a record 4.6 million units the same year.
Nio disclosed 10,603 job cuts in 2025 in its 20-F filing, ending the year with 35,032 full-time employees against 45,635 a year earlier — a 23.2% reduction, the sharpest single-year workforce contraction in Nio‘s history.
XPeng moved in the opposite direction, expanding headcount by 29.4% in 2025 and adding 4,520 net new employees to reach 19,884 by year-end — its largest annual increase since going public.
The IPO Surge
When Rivian priced its IPO at $78 per share on November 9, 2021, it employed roughly 9,500 people including more than 3,400 at the Normal plant.
By December 31, 2021, the figure had grown to 10,422 — making Rivian one of the fastest-hiring companies in the post-IPO 2021 cohort.
The pace accelerated through 2022, when Rivian added 3,700 net employees to reach 14,122 — a 35.5% expansion as the company ramped R1T pickup and R1S SUV production and built out its commercial Electric Delivery Van program with Amazon.
Headcount peaked at 16,790 at the end of 2023, with growth of 2,668 net employees that year as Rivian prepared for the launch of its second-generation R1 platform and continued to invest in its R2 development team.
The company opened a 1.1 million-square-foot expansion at the Normal plant during this period.
The Reduction Cycle
Rivian executed five publicly disclosed workforce reductions between February 2024 and October 2025.
In February 2024, the company announced it would cut approximately 10% of its salaried workforce, with CEO RJ Scaringe citing a “challenging macroeconomic environment” including high interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty.
The cuts were the third round in Rivian‘s history, following the 2022 and 2023 reductions.
A second 2024 round in April affected approximately 1% of total staff — concentrated in non-manufacturing functions.
The combined 2024 cuts produced a net 1,929-employee reduction, with year-end headcount falling to 14,861.
The 2025 cuts followed in three rounds.
In late June, Rivian cut approximately 140 employees, or roughly 1% of its workforce, primarily from the manufacturing team — described internally as eliminating roles that created “process inefficiencies” ahead of R2.
A second 2025 round on September 4 affected approximately 150 employees, less than 1.5% of staff, mostly in the commercial team handling sales and service operations.
The third 2025 round, announced on October 23, was the largest of the year — more than 600 employees, or 4.5% of the workforce — concentrated in marketing, vehicle operations, sales and delivery, and mobile operations.
“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,” Scaringe said in an internal memo.
Affected employees were placed on paid administrative leave for 60 days, remaining on the payroll until December 23, 2025, with severance determined by Rivian‘s internal grade-level system, according to internal documents reported by Business Insider.
The Joint-Venture Personnel Flows
The November 2024 formation of RV Tech materially affected Rivian‘s headcount disclosure beginning with the 2024 10-K and has since drawn an undisclosed number of Rivian employees into the joint venture in dual or migrated roles.
The most prominent dual-role figure is Wassym Bensaid, who serves concurrently as Rivian‘s Chief Software Officer and as Co-CEO and Chief Technology Officer of RV Tech alongside Volkswagen-side counterpart Carsten Helbing.
Other Rivian executives have migrated outright.
Aly Huelman, who spent four years in progressively senior human-resources roles at Rivian, joined RV Tech as Head of People upon its formation.
Gerard Joyce was promoted from Senior Director, Systems Safety at Rivian to a corresponding role at the joint venture.
Eric Hulser, formerly at Rivian after stints at Tesla and Waymo, now serves as Senior Director, Vehicle, Fleet and Factory Applications at RV Tech.
Manasi Vartak joined as VP of AI and Data earlier this month. Beth Harrington serves as VP of Programs and Business Operations.
The joint venture’s website lists only the two co-CEOs, but public filings, LinkedIn profiles, and director registries indicate roughly a dozen senior executives at RV Tech.
A dedicated development team has also been established in Canada last year, supplementing existing operations in the joint venture’s Palo Alto, California headquarters.
The personnel migrations remain captured within the consolidated 10-K total of 15,232.
Two Different Headcount Numbers
Rivian‘s 2026 proxy statement, also filed Monday, used a different employee perimeter — 13,624 employees — to calculate the company’s CEO pay ratio.
The 1,608-employee gap to the 10-K figure reflects exclusions allowed under SEC rules for identifying the median employee, including the consolidated joint venture and a de minimis carve-out for non-U.S. employees.
The CEO pay ratio of 4,458-to-1 — comparing CEO RJ Scaringe’s $402.6 million 2025 compensation to the $90,316 median employee — was calculated against this narrower 13,624-employee population.
