Rivian’s founder and CEO RJ Scaringe is taking up a brand new function at his firm as a part of a restructuring forward of subsequent 12 months’s launch of the R2 SUV, which entails a layoff of greater than 600 workers.

Scaringe instructed workers in an e-mail on Thursday that he might be performing as Rivian’s chief advertising and marketing officer on an interim foundation as the corporate searches for somebody to fill that place for the primary time. The top of Rivian’s “advertising and marketing experiences” crew and the lead of the corporate’s inventive studio will now report on to Scaringe, based on a duplicate of the e-mail obtained by TechCrunch.

It’s not clear what number of direct experiences Scaringe already has — a spokesperson declined to remark — although he instructed the Decoder podcast final 12 months that it was a “massive quantity.”

The cuts introduced Thursday are Rivian’s third set of layoffs this 12 months. The corporate let go of round 140 workers on its manufacturing crew in June, as TechCrunch first reported on the time. Rivian made a similarly-sized reduce to its gross sales and repair operation in September. These layoffs observe a extra dramatic 10% discount of Rivian’s workforce in early 2024.

“I’m writing to share a troublesome replace,” Scaringe mentioned in Thursday’s e-mail to Rivian workers. “With the launch of R2 in entrance of us and the necessity to profitably scale our enterprise, now we have made the very troublesome determination to make quite a few structural changes to our groups. These modifications lead to a discount within the measurement of our crew by roughly 4.5%.”

Scaringe mentioned the “altering working backdrop” — a nod to the lack of the federal EV tax credit score, elevated tariffs from the Trump administration, and common headwinds towards clear vitality initiatives within the U.S. — pressured the corporate to “rethink how we’re scaling our go-to-market capabilities.”

Along with Scaringe taking level on Rivian’s advertising and marketing and inventive divisions, the corporate can also be “streamlining” the client expertise, based on the e-mail. Scaringe mentioned Rivian is transferring its “automobile operations” crew and integrating it with the corporate’s service division. In the meantime, Rivian’s supply and “cell operations” will now stay contained in the gross sales division.

These structural modifications are being made to “guarantee the acquisition expertise is as seamless as attainable with a single touchpoint all through your entire gross sales course of and to supply,” he wrote.