Director of Perception

About Forterra

Forterra is a leading provider of autonomous systems for ground-based movement in the working world. Amongst some of the earliest innovators in the field of driverless technology, Forterra is focused on building systems that protect front-line soldiers and enable civilian workers in our industrial base. Forterra is the go-to provider of ground autonomy solutions for the U.S. Department of Defense, which harnesses the technology for asymmetric warfare in critical conditions.

About the role

• We are looking for a deeply technical and visionary leader to own and evolve Forterra’s Perception systems for the AutoDrive autonomous vehicle product. 
• As Director of Perception, you will lead the team responsible for how our autonomous vehicles understand their environment—across LiDAR, RADAR, camera, and other sensor modalities. Your team will own the end-to-end perception stack, from raw data ingestion and synchronization through detection, tracking, and prediction. This work is fundamental to the performance, safety, and reliability of AutoDrive across defense and industrial applications. 
• Forterra tackles the hardest problems in mobile autonomy. Many of our key market segments are with our defense partners, who operate across the globe in complex, off-road, never-mapped domains. Mission failure is unacceptable. To support perception in such a challenging environment, you’ll work closely with our R&D, Growth, and Engineering and Product leadership to shape the roadmap for Perception, guide architectural decisions, and grow a world-class team to deliver robust, scalable perception solutions that work in the real world. 

What you'll do

• Own the strategy around design, development, and deployment of the perception system for AutoDrive, including sensor fusion, object detection, object classification, semantic segmentation, and tracking and prediction. 

• Build and scale a high-performance team of engineers focused on multimodal perception—camera, LiDAR, radar, and more. 

• Drive architectural decisions and ensure the perception stack is modular, testable, and performant in real-time environments. 

• Collaborate closely with Platform, Behavior Generation, Localization, and C3 teams to ensure seamless integration with upstream and downstream systems. 

• Collaborate with the Data team on data collection, annotation strategies, model training, and continuous validation pipelines for real-world robustness. 

• Balance cutting-edge research with pragmatic engineering tradeoffs to deliver reliable and maintainable systems. 

• Define hiring needs, establish team culture, and mentor engineers at all levels. 

Qualifications

• Degree in Robotics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or a related technical field. 

• Proven track record building and deploying real-time perception systems in production environments (autonomy, robotics, defense, or similar). 

• 10+ years of experience in technical engineering roles, with at least 5+ years leading high-performance teams. 

• Strong grasp of computer vision, sensor fusion, probabilistic filtering, and modern machine learning techniques. 

• Experience working with large datasets and training infrastructure for perception models. 

• Familiarity with real-time systems, latency constraints, and robustness in edge environments. 

• U.S. Person status is required as this position needs to access export-controlled data. 

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with C++, ROS2, Python, TensorRT, CUDA, DDS, and real-time Linux. 

• Experience with LiDAR and radar perception pipelines, sensor calibration, and time synchronization. 

• Exposure to defense or off-road autonomy applications. 

• Experience in high-growth startup environments. 

Education & Experience

• Degree in Robotics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, or a related technical field. 
• 10+ years of experience in technical engineering roles, with at least 5+ years leading high-performance teams. 

US Salary Range
 $250,000—$350,000
 

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 Forterra’s overall compensation package. In 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.  

Forterra is an equal-opportunity employer, providing and promoting equal employment opportunity in accordance with local, state, and federal laws. Forterrans 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 applications will receive equal consideration for employment.