Staff Systems Engineer

Forterra; Clarksburg (MD); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Premium healthcare benefits

20 days PTO per year

7 weeks parental leave

Tuition reimbursement $9k annually

401(k) with company match up to 4%

Job summary

Forterra is seeking a Systems Engineer for the Autonomous Yard Truck program in the US. You will own requirements integrity, traceability, and architectural mapping across autonomy, vehicle systems, and safety concerns.

You will lead cross-functional reviews, mentor engineers, and ensure changes are properly analyzed for safety and system impact while collaborating with safety teams and test organizations.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field with emphasis on systems engineering.
• Experience developing and decomposing requirements and ensuring traceability.
• Experience with safety analysis and architecture development is preferred.
• Proven ability to coordinate across multiple engineering disciplines.
• Proven leadership and stakeholder-management skills in complex programs.

Responsibilities

• Own capture, structure, review, quality, and maintenance of requirements in Jama Connect.
• Maintain end-to-end traceability from SoS to product requirements and tests.
• Ensure requirements link to validation and verification activities; resolve gaps.

Skills

Requirements development

Traceability

Decomposition

Allocation

Technical leadership

Stakeholder mgmt

Cross-functional

Facilitation

Education

Bachelor's degree in Systems/EE/ME/CE/SE/Robotics

Tools

Jama Connect

IBM DOORS

Polarion

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

The Systems Engineer is the systems engineering authority for the Autonomous Yard Truck program. The role owns the integrity of requirements, functional architecture, traceability, and technical change impact activities across product, autonomy, drive-by-wire, vehicle, safety, software, hardware, integration, and test teams. This engineer ensures product intent is translated into implementable and verifiable system behavior while helping mature the organization's systems engineering practices and AI-enabled tooling.

What you'll do

Requirements and Traceability

• Own the capture, structure, review, quality, and maintenance of Product, System of Systems (SoS), and System requirements in Jama Connect.
• Maintain end-to-end traceability so System requirements trace to SoS requirements, SoS requirements trace to Product requirements, and every System requirement has a justified path to the Product need it supports.
• Ensure Product requirements link to validation scenarios and SoS/System requirements link to verification test cases; regularly resolve missing, incorrect, duplicate, or unjustified requirements and relationships.

Functional Architecture and Safety Integration

• Develop and maintain the Yard Truck SoS functional architecture and use it to derive, organize, map, and allocate requirements across autonomy, the Drive-by-Wire Kit, vehicle systems, operator interfaces, remote operations, and supporting systems.
• Ensure the architecture supports safety analyses, including Functional Hazard Analysis for autonomy and ISO 26262 Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment activities for the Drive-by-Wire Kit.
• Coordinate closely with the Yard Truck Safety team so hazards, safety goals, mitigations, safety concepts, and safety-derived requirements are reflected in the architecture, Jama baseline, and verification approach.

Implementation Alignment and Change Impact

• Work with systems engineers and development subject-matter experts to allocate and trace System requirements to the software, hardware, controls, interfaces, and vehicle elements responsible for Number of headcount you want to hire? 2 1 implementation.
• Confirm that product features are fully decomposed into implementable system behavior and represented in development, integration, verification, and validation activities.
• Partner with development and test teams to identify requirement gaps, ambiguities, conflicts, and needed changes discovered during implementation and testing.
• Assess new features, feature changes, and defects against requirements and architecture, including impacts to safety, interfaces, allocations, verification cases, validation scenarios, and traceability; distinguish implementation defects from requirements defects, architecture gaps, interface issues, and legitimate feature changes.

Systems Engineering Process and Tooling

• Help define and mature the systems engineering processes applied to the Yard Truck program and represent program needs in broader organizational process, governance, and tooling discussions.
• Collaborate with other systems engineers to evaluate and integrate emerging AI-assisted requirements, architecture, traceability, review, and change-impact tools, while ensuring outputs remain subject to engineering review and configuration control.
• Make requirements and systems artifacts easier for non-systems-engineering personnel to understand and use through clear structures, terminology, visualizations, reports, dashboards, training, and practical workflows.

Technical Leadership

• Lead cross-functional reviews involving product, autonomy, software, hardware, controls, safety, test, vehicle integration, and operations; resolve requirement, architecture, interface, and ownership issues through influence and technical judgment.
• Mentor systems engineers and provide working-level guidance to stakeholders using Jama, architecture models, traceability information, and related engineering artifacts.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Systems Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Robotics, or a related technical discipline.
• Seven or more years of systems engineering experience supporting complex cyber-physical systems integrating software, hardware, sensing, controls, communications, and physical equipment.
• Demonstrated experience with requirements development, decomposition, allocation, configuration management, and bidirectional traceability across multiple levels of a system hierarchy.
• Experience developing or maintaining functional architectures and using them for interface management, implementation allocation, safety analysis, and verification planning.
• Experience coordinating across software, hardware, controls, safety, integration, product, and test organizations to resolve technical issues and assess engineering changes.
• Experience with Jama Connect, IBM DOORS, Polarion, or a comparable requirements platform, along with strong technical leadership, facilitation, writing, and stakeholder-management skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Systems engineering experience in autonomous vehicles, advanced driver‑assistance systems, robotics, automated industrial equipment, or intelligent transportation.
• Experience with autonomy functions such as perception, localization, behavior planning, vehicle control, teleoperation, remote operations, or Drive‑by‑Wire systems.
• Experience supporting Functional Hazard Analysis, ISO 26262 HARA, functional safety concepts, or safety‑derived requirements.
• Experience with model‑based systems engineering tools and/or the evaluation, deployment, or governance of AI‑assisted engineering workflows.

US Salary Range
$150,000—$190,000

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.