Rivian faucets Capital One exec Diane Lye as its first CIO • TechCrunch

Rivian has employed Diane Lye as its first chief info officer, a place that the EV maker says is important to increase globally.

Lye’s hiring comes as Rivian consolidates its inner and exterior expertise groups throughout its quite a few departments, together with manufacturing IT and customer-facing digital merchandise. It’s also forward of Rivian’s deliberate growth into Georgia, the place it’s constructing one other manufacturing facility, and abroad by means of a partnership with Mercedes-Benz. Rivian stated IT and cybersecurity might want to turn out to be extra refined because it scales globally.

The appointment additionally comes amid a restructuring that resulted in layoffs of about 6% of its workforce and govt modifications, together with the appointment of Frank Klein as its new chief working officer.

IT and cybersecurity infrastructure are crucial elements — some argue the inspiration — for any firm, no matter measurement. In Rivian’s case, the corporate isn’t simply giant (about 14,000 individuals work there) it has a widening community of places of work, factories and different services unfold all through the U.S., Canada and the UK. And whereas PricewaterhouseCoopers govt Christopher Perrigo was interim CIO since January, previous to that the place didn’t exist.

Rivian’s headquarters are in Irvine, California and its solely manufacturing facility (for now) is in Regular, Illinois, the place the R1T pickup truck, R1S SUV and industrial electrical van are produced. Its software program stack and automobile electronics division relies out of Palo Alto, California; automobile engineering, prototyping, provide chain and accounting are in Plymouth, Michigan and its automobile administration software program groups are at an workplace in Vancouver, British Colombia. Rivian additionally has an workplace in Carson, California centered on electrical energy conversion, a take a look at facility in Arizona and a complicated ideas engineering staff within the UK. Its European industrial middle is in Amsterdam.

“With Diane’s expertise scaling international expertise groups throughout a number of industries, together with retail, expertise and finance, we’re extraordinarily excited that she is becoming a member of Rivian at such a crucial time in our progress,” Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe stated in an announcement.

Lye has held quite a few tech-centric management roles over the previous three a long time, together with a nine-year stint at Amazon on the retail enterprise facet and at Amazon Internet Companies. She went onto the capital markets division at Citi and shopper banking and capital markets at Financial institution of America.

Extra lately, Lye was govt vp and bank card divisional CIO at Capital One, the place she led a 4,500-person group chargeable for all of the expertise required to run the corporate’s bank card companies. Throughout her six-year tenure, Lye led a program to migrate all information, analytics expertise, threat expertise, and monetary programs to the AWS cloud.