Rivian

Success story snapshot

Challenge: When two of the world's most prominent automotive brands partnered to build a joint software platform, they faced siloed yet rapidly scaling engineering teams, a constantly evolving codebase with limited technical writing resources, and strict regulatory and security requirements.

Solution: Rather than maintaining a fragile homegrown server and a patchwork of tools, Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies (RV Tech) consolidated onto Mintlify—one platform that serves its internal, air-gapped, and external audiences with per-audience access control and fits inside its self-hosted, locked-down environment. Next, the team is working toward generating docs directly from GitLab commits with AI, so documentation keeps pace with the code without expanding the writing team.

Key Results:

• 30 minutes to migrate existing MDX-based documentation to Mintlify
• Homegrown documentation server deprecated, replaced with one maintainable platform
• Four engineering teams contributing documentation on a single platform, with more onboarding
• ~120 engineering hours saved annually on documentation tooling and maintenance

Siloed teams and a single point of failure

RV Tech is a joint venture between two of the world's most prominent automakers. Building a cutting-edge software platform designed to scale from thousands to millions of vehicles. As the engineering organization scaled, documentation became a serious roadblock.

Core docs lived on a homegrown server built and maintained by a single engineer. Meanwhile, each of the group's 20+ engineering teams managed its own documentation in a different tool, from Confluence to Jira to custom solutions. “It's like our documentation was too centralized and too fragmented at the same time,” says Eric Hulser, Sr. Director, Connected Services, RV Tech. “There was no unified developer experience, which made it impossible to scale. Something had to be done, fast.”

The 30-minute test

As RV Tech searched for a new platform to manage its growing documentation needs, it came across Mintlify. The team's Senior Manager of Vehicle and Fleet Management Applications, Steve Westergaard, decided to put the platform to the test—and the results surprised him.

"I took all our existing MDX-based documentation and ran a test to see how hard it would be to move from what we'd built in-house to Mintlify, and it was super easy,” he recalls. “It only took about 30 minutes or so."

But this wasn't the only thing about Mintlify that impressed the team. What stood out was how much of the documentation work Mintlify's AI-native platform could take on.

Keeping docs in sync with a fast-moving codebase and a lean team

RV Tech's codebase was changing far faster than its handful of technical writers could keep up with, causing documentation to drift with no way to detect the divergence, let alone easily fix it.

“The automotive industry is highly regulated,” shares Hulser, “and our ability to launch new vehicles literally depends on how often we update our documentation, no exceptions.” Mintlify's AI-powered content-generation addressed both problems directly.

The agent-native platform generates documentation directly from GitLab commits, turning the code changes engineers are already making into docs updates—no additional writing resources required. It also continuously monitors code repos, flagging documentation that has fallen out of step and surfacing drift before it ships.

“Mintlify's AI capabilities make it possible for us to scale and maintain regulatory compliance without having to hire a bunch of technical writers to do it manually,” says Hulser. “Launching new vehicles and fulfilling our company's mission would be exponentially harder without Mintlify.”

Managing a multi-audience environment with strict enterprise security requirements

For all of Mintlify's AI capabilities, RV Tech's decision to move forward with the platform ultimately came down to security. RV Tech's security requirements ruled out the standard authorization flows most documentation platforms assume. On top of that, RV Tech serves three distinct audiences, each with different access requirements: its own engineers, external operational deployments, and the wider public. Most platforms force a choice between standing up three separate systems or bolting crude permissions onto one.

Mintlify's multi-deployment architecture handled all of it under a single platform. With Mintlify, RV Tech runs three separate instances—internal, air-gapped on-prem, and external—with per-instance access control tailored to each audience.

Public docs stay open, internal docs sit behind corporate SSO, each instance authenticates according to its audience's requirements, without compromising RV Tech's security mode—without loosening a single requirement.

“Most tools asked us to make an exception to our security model. Mintlify worked with our GitLab pipeline, our internal identity stack, and all three of our audiences without us having to compromise anything,” says Westergaard.

The bottom line

By partnering with Mintlify, RV Tech replaced a fragile, fragmented documentation setup with a single platform that fits a demanding venture on its own terms—consolidated across four teams, secured for three very different audiences, and integrated with infrastructure it trusts. The core docs no longer hinge on one server and one person, and as Mintlify's AI takes on more of the documentation work, RV Tech can keep its technical writing team lean and its engineers focused on the core product.

“Mintlify gave us a foundation we can build on,” says Hulser. “As we expand AI-generated documentation, we'll move faster, serve more languages, and keep our engineers focused on what they're here to do—building the software that powers the next generation of vehicles.”