Staff Systems Engineer

Forterra • Clarksburg, MD

3d • $150,000 - $190,000

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 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, and physical equipment.
• Demonstrated experience with requirements development, decomposition, allocation, configuration management, and bidirectional traceability across multiple levels of a system hierarchy.
• Experience developing or maintaining functional architectures and using them for interface management, implementation allocation, safety analysis, and verification planning.
• Experience coordinating across software, hardware, controls, safety, integration, product, and test organizations to resolve technical issues and assess engineering changes.
• Experience with Jama Connect, IBM DOORS, Polarion, or a comparable requirements platform, along with strong technical leadership, facilitation, writing, and stakeholder-management skills.

Nice To Haves

• Systems engineering experience in autonomous vehicles, advanced driver-assistance systems, robotics, automated industrial equipment, or intelligent transportation.
• Experience with autonomy functions such as perception, localization, behavior planning, vehicle control, teleoperation, remote operations, or Drive-by-Wire systems.
• Experience supporting Functional Hazard Analysis, ISO 26262 HARA, functional safety concepts, or safety-derived requirements.
• Experience with model-based systems engineering tools and/or the evaluation, deployment, or governance of AI-assisted engineering workflows.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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: Senior