Director of DevOps and Tooling

FORTERRA; Clarksburg (MD); On-site; USD 175,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Premium healthcare

PTO 20 days

Parental leave 7 weeks

Tuition reimbursement

401(k) match

Job summary

Forterra seeks a Director of DevOps and Tooling to own cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, and internal platforms, driving fast iteration across autonomous systems. You will own the tooling stack, contribute in Terraform, and ensure compliance with ITAR and NIST 800-171 while maintaining engineering velocity.

This hands-on leadership role requires building and leading a team, shaping platform strategy, and collaborating with cross-functional engineering groups to deliver secure, scalable solutions

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software, infrastructure, or DevOps engineering experience.
• 3+ years leading and growing engineering teams.
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS preferred).
• Infrastructure-as-code tooling experience (Terraform/Ansible).
• Production experience with Kubernetes and containerized workloads.
• Experience in regulated environments (ITAR, NIST 800-171, CMMC).
• Proficiency in at least one language (Python/Go/C#/TypeScript).
• Familiarity with observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana).
• Able to work with hardware/embedded teams and test infrastructure.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap for cloud infra, CI/CD, and tooling.
• Define build-vs-buy strategy for engineering tooling.
• Set standards for IaC, reproducibility, and release engineering.
• Drive platform investment and vendor strategy with execs.
• Design/operate cloud and on-prem infra for autonomy development.
• Ensure secure environments compliant with ITAR/NIST 800-171.
• Lead end-to-end developer experience and toolchain.
• Build/maintain CI/CD pipelines for embedded and cloud workloads.
• Mentor and grow DevOps and infrastructure engineers.
• Maintain SLA-driven internal platforms.

Skills

Cloud infrastructure

IaC tooling

Kubernetes

CI/CD systems

Security/compliance

Programming languages

Observability

Hardware/embedded collaboration

Education

B.S. in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Terraform

Ansible

GitLab CI

Jenkins

AWS GovCloud

Job description

About Forterra

At Forterra, we are unleashing autonomy at scale to transform the battlefield. Our mission is to build the foundational platforms that enable an intelligent ecosystem to coordinate, adapt, and execute with speed and precision even in the uncertainty and disruption of modern conflict. In an era marked by rapid technological change and evolving threats, we design for flexibility, survivability, and operational dominance.

Forterra delivers weapons, sensors, and battlefield effects through integrated autonomous networks reaching operational areas faster, safer, and without placing human lives at risk. Our systems operate with distributed control, dynamic routing, and real-time responsiveness, enabling sustained advantage across complex mission environments.

About the role

We are looking for a Director of DevOps and Tooling to own the infrastructure, developer platforms, and toolchain that every engineering team at Forterra builds on. Autonomy programs live or die on iteration speed: how fast a controls engineer can get a change onto a vehicle, how quickly a perception team can replay a field log, how much simulation a program can run overnight. You'll own the systems that determine those answers.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll build and lead the team, but you'll also be in the CI/CD pipelines, in Terraform, and in the room when a compliance boundary and a delivery deadline collide. Because we operate in a controlled defense environment, you'll be responsible for platforms that are simultaneously fast for engineers and defensible to auditors - ITAR-controlled, NIST 800-171 aligned, and built to support programs of record.

What you'll do

Platform Architecture & Strategy

• Own the technical roadmap for cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, developer tooling, and internal platforms across the company.
• Define build-vs-buy strategy for engineering tooling, and make the tradeoff calls between vendor solutions, open source, and in-house development.
• Set standards for infrastructure-as-code, environment reproducibility, artifact management, and release engineering, and drive adoption across engineering teams.
• Partner with the executive team on multi-year platform investment, vendor strategy, and organizational scaling plans.
• Design, operate, and scale cloud and on-premise infrastructure supporting autonomy development, vehicle software, simulation, and back-office systems.
• Own architecture and operation of controlled environments (e.g., AWS GovCloud or equivalent) that satisfy NIST 800-171, CMMC, and ITAR requirements without becoming a bottleneck to engineering velocity.
• Drive infrastructure cost efficiency through capacity planning, workload right-sizing, and account and network architecture.
• Establish observability, alerting, and incident response practices for internal platforms, and own uptime and reliability targets for the services engineering depends on.
• Own the end-to-end developer experience: source control, code review, build, test, artifact promotion, and deployment.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that support embedded, robotics, and cloud workloads, including cross-compilation, hardware targets, and long-running simulation jobs.
• Drive down build, test, and deployment times as a first-class engineering objective, and instrument the toolchain so bottlenecks are measurable rather than anecdotal.
• Own and operate core internal platforms (source control, issue tracking, documentation, artifact repositories, and business systems integrations) as production services with defined SLAs.

Test Infrastructure & Automation

• Partner with vehicle software, controls, and autonomy teams to build and scale automated test infrastructure, including hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) benches and virtualized/containerized test racks.
• Build the data infrastructure that lets engineers ingest, store, index, and replay vehicle telemetry and field logs at scale.
• Enable regression and scenario testing to run continuously against every change, so integration issues surface in the lab rather than on the vehicle.
• Hire, grow, and lead a team of DevOps, platform, and infrastructure engineers, including distributed and near-shore staff where appropriate.
• Establish a blameless operational culture: clear ownership, honest postmortems, sustainable on-call.
• Mentor engineers on infrastructure and automation practice, and develop the next layer of technical leadership on the team.
• Manage roadmap, prioritization, and delivery commitments against the needs of multiple competing programs.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with software, controls, systems, and program engineering leads to understand what their workflows actually need and where the toolchain is failing them.
• Partner with IT, Security, and Compliance to keep engineering environments both usable and auditable.
• Translate infrastructure and compliance constraints into terms program and executive stakeholders can act on.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of software, infrastructure, or DevOps engineering experience, including 3+ years leading and growing engineering teams.
• B.S. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechatronics, or a related field — or equivalent hands-on experience. Demonstrated depth matters more than the specific degree.
• Deep hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and infrastructure-as-code tooling such as Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and container-based workloads, including operating clusters rather than only consuming them.
• Demonstrated ownership of CI/CD systems (GitLab CI, Jenkins, or equivalent) at organizational scale, with measurable improvements to build, test, or release cycle time.
• Experience operating in a regulated or controlled environment, with working knowledge of ITAR, NIST 800-171, or comparable security and compliance frameworks.
• Proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (e.g., Python, Go, C#, TypeScript) sufficient to build and maintain tooling directly, not only review it.
• Experience with observability and monitoring stacks (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana) and with defining and holding reliability targets.
• Ability to work credibly with hardware and embedded teams and reason about test infrastructure that includes physical devices.
• Must be a U.S. Person and eligible to obtain a security clearance in the future. No current clearance is required to start.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience founding or rebuilding a DevOps, platform, or infrastructure function from scratch.
• Background in aerospace, defense, automotive, robotics, or another hardware-intensive engineering environment.
• Experience with AWS GovCloud, Landing Zone Accelerator, or large-scale controlled-environment migrations.
• Track record of significant infrastructure cost reduction without loss of capability or compliance posture.
• Experience owning business-critical internal systems (ERP, MES, PLM) or integrating them with engineering toolchains.
• Experience building and managing distributed or near-shore engineering teams.

US Salary Range

$175,000 - $250,000

The salary range for this role is an estimate and is based on a wide variety of compensation factors. The salary offered to candidates will vary based on a variety of factors including (but not limited to) relevant work experience, education, specialized training, critical expertise, training, and more. Equity in Forterra is included in most of our full-time, high-demand roles and is therefore considered part of Forterra’s overall compensation package. In addition to base salary and equity, Forterra offers competitive benefits for full-time employees including:

• Premium Healthcare Benefits: Three plan options, including an HSA-eligible plan, with Forterra covering 80% of the plan premium for you and your dependents.
• Basic Life/AD&D, short and long-term disability insurance plans 100% covered by Forterra, plus the option to purchase additional life insurance for you and your dependents.
• Extremely generous company holiday calendar including a winter break in December.
• Competitive paid time off (PTO) offering 20 days accrued per year.
• A minimum of 7 weeks fully paid parental leave for birth/adoption.
• A $9k annual tuition reimbursement or professional development stipend.
• Fully stocked beverage refrigerators with all the Celsius your little heart desires.
• 401(k) retirement savings plan, including traditional, Roth 401(k), and after-tax deferral with company match up to 4%.

Your recruiter will be able to share more information about our salary and benefits offering during the hiring process.

CLEARANCE ELIGIBILITY - This position may require eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance. For more information about U.S. Security Clearances: click here.

Forterra is an equal-opportunity employer, providing and promoting equal employment opportunity in all personnel practices. Forterrans are unique, talented individuals who are united through a shared passion to deliver autonomous systems that enable national resilience and a robust supply chain.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any factor, including veteran and disability status, and criminal history, in accordance with applicable local, state, and federal laws.

Forterra is also committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. Please let your recruiter know if you need an accommodation at any point during the interview process.