Senior Electrical Engineer - Design

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  systems operate with distributed control, dynamic routing, and real‑time responsiveness, enabling sustained advantage across complex mission environments.

Forterra is looking for a hands‑on Electrical Engineer to join the Core Product team in Clarksburg, MD. You will be working with a small team of engineers to develop autonomous systems for military and commercial vehicles. This involves designing and building the systems critical for autonomous vehicles using components such as embedded computers, power systems, networking components and various sensors.

Your time will be split between working on the next‑gen system design, and maintaining existing fielded designs. This involves working on PCB/CCA designs with SoCs, microprocessors/controllers, and interfaces such as DDR, I2C, CAN, SPI, Ser Des and automotive Ethernet. You will also work on power supply designs for both PCBs designed in‑house, as well as COTS components. Integration and debugging of both in‑house designs and COTS designs is also necessary for the role, as quick technology updates are always on the roadmap.

• Design high‑reliability & high‑safety criticality hardware for both commercial and military autonomous vehicles.
• Generate design documentation for design maintainability, such as stress analysis, power budgets, firmware/hardware interfaces, SI and PI analysis, component and design trades.
• Provide technical leadership on projects to guide a small, focused team of electrical engineers to develop new hardware designs from concept through production.

• Suggest and perform prototyping testing for risk‑reduction of circuits at the component, subsystem, and system levels.
• Perform validation testing of designs through analysis, simulation, and hardware testing.
• Conduct hardware bring‑up, debugging, and validation testing at board and subsystem levels.
• Maintain design verification test matrix.

• Participate in interdisciplinary design teams and design reviews.
• Work cross‑functionally with systems, safety, software, test, other engineering groups and procurement throughout all phases of the product development lifecycle.

• Identify and implement improvements of designs to reduce cost, increase yield, and improve throughput.
• Provide production build support for the manufacturing of prototypes through volume ramp‑up to production.
• Mentor and train junior engineers.

• B.S. or M.S. Degree in Electrical Engineering or Computer Engineering.
• 6+ years of hardware design experience.
• Design and simulation of complex digital and analog circuits, using circuit simulator, signal integrity and power integrity tools like LTSpice and Hyper Lynx.
• Experience working with analog and high‑speed (3GHz+) digital signals.
• Experience designing high‑power and high‑speed PCB stackups for high‑reliability / high‑safety criticality systems.
• Excellent problem‑solving skills, hands‑on abilities, and working knowledge of common test equipment such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers and VNAs.
• Familiarity with design, analysis and manufacturing standards associated with complex multi‑layer PCBs.
• Ability to solve complex technical problems independently.
• Ability to work cross‑functionally.
• Experience with design for cost, test and manufacturing.
• Experience with Altium Designer, OrCAD, or similar schematic capture / PCB Layout software.

• Experience in small engineering team environment.
• Experience with automotive hardware design.
• Experience designing networking hardware.
• Experience…