Navigation Software Engineer

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.

The Forterra navigation team seeks a Navigation Software Engineer to help build and validate the localization systems that let our autonomous vehicles know where they are, reliably and in every environment. This spans the full navigation stack: real-time sensor-fusion filters that combine IMU, GNSS, radar and wheel odometry; GNSS processing, including carrier-phase techniques and integrity monitoring; sensor calibration; and the assured localization that must keep working when GNSS is degraded or denied.

The Navigation team partners closely with the autonomy, safety, perception and vehicle integration teams to turn research-grade estimation into software that runs on fielded vehicles.

Forterra is a fast-growing company at the early stages of growth. Consistent with this fast growth, members of our Navigation team must be resourceful, rigorous, and eager to take ownership of hard technical problems. The Navigation Engineer role will require strong fundamentals in estimation and C++ to work within a large, real-time codebase, with a singular focus on helping Forterra deploy its technology into operational settings.

In addition to developing and tuning filters, you will work across the whole lifecycle: designing validation with log replay and regression metrics, running field tests, diagnosing failures from real vehicle data, and defining the health and integrity outputs that safety functions depend

on. Experience across all these areas is not expected, but a willingness to learn and adapt is.

• Be a key member of Forterra's small, dynamic Navigation team.
• Take responsibility for well-scoped pieces of the navigation stack that directly affect how our vehicles perform in the field.
• Develop and improve sensor-fusion estimators. Implement and tune Kalman-filter-based navigation (error-state EKF, UKF, GSF) that fuses IMU, GNSS, Doppler radar and wheel odometry, including operation when GNSS is degraded or denied.
• Work on GNSS processing. Contribute to carrier-phase techniques such as TDCP, dual-antenna heading and RTK, and to the integrity, jamming and spoofing monitoring that decides when GNSS can be trusted.
• Prove that it works. Capture vehicle data, run deterministic replays and regression metrics, inject faults, and report results against clear pass/fail tolerances.
• Support calibration and field testing. Help estimate and verify sensor lever arms and mounts, characterize sensors, and debug navigation issues from real vehicle logs.
• Build safety-relevant outputs. Implement the health status, warnings and output interfaces that fault
  - Number of headcount you want to hire? management and safety functions depend on.
• Collaborate across teams. Work with the autonomy, safety, perception and vehicle integration engineers, write clear design notes, and take part in code reviews.

• 2+ years of experience developing navigation, state estimation or sensor-fusion software, in industry or in graduate research (more senior engineers are also encouraged to apply; the position may be adjusted based on experience).
• BS or MS in Electrical, Aerospace or Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics or a related field.
• Strong C++ skills and a working knowledge of Kalman filtering, INS and GNSS.

• Hands-on field testing with autonomous vehicles, robots or aircraft.
• Navigation software that has shipped on a fielded platform, not only in simulation.
• Experience with GNSS-denied navigation, or with GNSS jamming and spoofing mitigation.
• Combination of industry and research experience in estimation, e.g. a thesis on sensor fusion followed by product work.
• Experience working on defense or safety-critical programs.

$120,000 -…