Director of DevOps and Tooling

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 aperceptionteam can replay a field log how much simulation a program can run overnight.Youllown the systems thatdeterminethose answers.

This is a hands-on leadership role.Youllbuild and lead the team butyoullalso be in theCI/CDpipelines in Terraform and in the room when a compliance boundary and a delivery deadline collide. Because weoperatein a controlled defense environmentyoullbe responsible forplatforms that are simultaneously fast for engineers and defensible to auditors ITAR-controlled NIST 800-171 aligned and built to support programs of record.

What youll do

Platform Architecture & Strategy

• Own the technical roadmap forcloudinfrastructure 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.

Infrastructure Cloud & Compliance

• Designoperate and scale cloud andon-premiseinfrastructure 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.

Developer Tooling & CI/CD

• Own the end-to-end developer experience: source control code review build test artifact promotion and deployment.

• Build andmaintainCI/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 engineeringobjective and instrument the toolchain so bottlenecks are measurable rather than anecdotal.

• Own andoperatecore 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.

Team Leadership

• Hire grow and lead a team of DevOps platform and infrastructure engineers including distributed and near-shore staff whereappropriate.

• Establish a blameless operational culture: clear ownership honest postmortems sustainableon-call.

• Mentor engineers on infrastructure and automationpractice anddevelop 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 workflowsactually needand 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.

• Experienceoperatingin a regulated or controlled environment with working knowledge of ITAR NIST 800-171 or comparable security and compliance frameworks.

• Proficiencyin at least one general-purpose language (e.g. Python Go C# TypeScript) sufficient to build andmaintaintooling 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 isto 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 recordof 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
$175000 - $250000

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 Forterras overall compensation 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 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.

To see Forterras candidate data privacy policy please visitForterra Legal Job Applicant Privacy Notice.

Required Experience:

Director