Rivian's Robot Startup Hires Veteran EV Exec Doug Field

Last year, Rivian launched its own robotics and AI venture, Mind Robotics. And now it's hired a new president, Doug Field, who previously spent time at Ford and Telsa working on EVs. While Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe will still be involved, Mind Robotics is Field's show to run now, TechCrunch reported this week.

“Him and I then really began digging into how important it is that we really think deeply and very intentionally about how we develop robotics and deploy robotics into our society, into our economy, and we found such alignment in how we thought about this from the overall mission of the business, but even more important, we found really deep alignment just in how we both work and how we build teams,” Scaringe reportedly said Tuesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 conference.

Field has some serious automotive tech credentials. He was at Apple, working on its Project Titan autonomous car before it was cancelled. He was the senior vice president of engineering at Tesla and helped get the Model 3 off the ground. And he spent the last five years at Ford working on electric vehicles—including assembling the skunkworks team making the Universal Electric Vehicle platform. He left the Detroit automaker this April amid a reshuffling of Ford's EV business. 

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“Integrating AI and robotics is one of the most important—and difficult—engineering challenges of our time,” Field said in a statement, per TechCrunch. “Mind has assembled an exceptional team and has a unique advantage: the ability to deploy and learn inside a real, high-volume factory from day one. I’m thrilled to join RJ in building a team, culture, and technology that will redefine what we can make in America.”

Rivian is going to be Mind Robotics' first customer, whenever the actual robots are ready for prime time. The robots aren't going to be humanoid like Tesla's. Instead, they'll be kind of humanoid and developed solely for manufacturing assistance. 

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