Staff Systems Engineer

Systems Engineer

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.

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 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,…