Director of DevOps and Tooling

Forterra • Clarksburg, MD

8d • $175,000 - $250,000

About The Position

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 a perception team can replay a field log, how much simulation a program can run overnight. You'll own the systems that determine those answers.
This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll build and lead the team, but you'll also be in the CI/CD pipelines, in Terraform, and in the room when a compliance boundary and a delivery deadline collide. Because we operate in a controlled defense environment, you'll be responsible for platforms that are simultaneously fast for engineers and defensible to auditors — ITAR-controlled, NIST 800-171 aligned, and built to support programs of record.

Requirements

• 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.
• Experience operating in a regulated or controlled environment, with working knowledge of ITAR, NIST 800-171, or comparable security and compliance frameworks.
• Proficiency in at least one general-purpose language (e.g., Python, Go, C#, TypeScript) sufficient to build and maintain tooling 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 is required to start.

Nice To Haves

• 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 record of 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.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical roadmap for cloud infrastructure, 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.
• Design, operate, and scale cloud and on-premise infrastructure 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.
• Own the end-to-end developer experience: source control, code review, build, test, artifact promotion, and deployment.
• Build and maintain CI/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 engineering objective, and instrument the toolchain so bottlenecks are measurable rather than anecdotal.
• Own and operate core internal platforms (source control, issue tracking, documentation, artifact repositories, and business systems integrations) as production services with defined SLAs.
• 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.
• Hire, grow, and lead a team of DevOps, platform, and infrastructure engineers, including distributed and near-shore staff where appropriate.
• Establish a blameless operational culture: clear ownership, honest postmortems, sustainable on-call.
• Mentor engineers on infrastructure and automation practice, and develop the next layer of technical leadership on the team.
• Manage roadmap, prioritization, and delivery commitments against the needs of multiple competing programs.
• Work closely with software, controls, systems, and program engineering leads to understand what their workflows actually need and 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.

Benefits

• 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%.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Education Level: Associate degree