Director of DevOps and Tooling

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 at risk. Our systems operate with distributed control, dynamic routing, and real-time responsiveness, enabling sustained advantage across complex mission environments.

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 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.

What you'll do

Platform Architecture & Strategy

• 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.

Infrastructure, Cloud & Compliance

• 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.

Developer Tooling & CI/CD

• 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.