Director of Data

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 strategic and technically strong leader to build and drive Forterra’s Data organization —spanning traditional vehicle telemetry and behavioral data to modern ML data pipelines for perception and autonomy.
• As Director of Data, you will be responsible for building the infrastructure, systems, and team that powers Forterra’s data lifecycle. This includes vehicle-side logging, real-time streaming and ingestion, backend storage and query infrastructure, analytics pipelines, and ML-focused tools for labeling, curation, and evaluation. Your work will directly support every pillar of the autonomous stack—from debugging and performance analysis to model development and fleet optimization.
• You’ll collaborate across every aspect of the AutoDrive system to define how data is collected, used, and turned into insight. This role is pivotal to the performance, safety, and scalability of our deployed autonomous systems. Your key customers are every team in the organization; our ambitious goal is to leverage our extensive autonomy datasets to improve efficiency and reduce failures across our teams.
  

What you'll do

• Own Forterra’s end-to-end data architecture—from vehicle telemetry logging through backend storage, indexing, and access.
• Manage data management and transfer strategy across a variety of uplinks (cell, satellite, physical) to maximize valuable data and minimize process delays.
• Build systems to ingest and analyze data from deployed autonomous vehicles, including diagnostics, health, and operational behavior.
• Lead the design and operation of ML data infrastructure, including pipelines for data curation, labeling, model evaluation, and feedback loops.
• Develop tools to visualize, mine, and monitor the health and performance of the vehicle fleet across diverse operational environments, including automated fault and failure detection.
• Collaborate with engineering, ML, and field teams to establish best practices for data quality, annotation strategies, and versioning.
• Manage a growing team of data engineers and ML operations engineers.
• Define the long-term data strategy in partnership with senior leadership, aligning with product and engineering goals.
  

Qualifications

• Proven success building production-grade data platforms in high-volume, high-velocity environments.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures (e.g., AWS), distributed data processing, and storage systems (e.g., S3, Kafka, Parquet, Snowflake, Redshift, or similar).
• Familiarity with tools for data labeling, curation, and evaluation in ML workflows.
• Strong understanding of system observability (metrics, logs, traces), and experience supporting diagnostics at scale.
• U.S. Person status is required as this position needs to access export-controlled data.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with robotics or autonomous systems data, including real-time telemetry and multimodal sensor data (LiDAR, camera, radar).
• Familiarity with ML training and deployment pipelines (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, Kubeflow, or similar).
• Experience integrating with fleet management or command-and-control platforms.
• Startup or high-growth experience, especially in mission-critical or regulated environments.
  

Education & Experience

• Degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of experience in technical roles focused on data systems or infrastructure.
• 5+ years of experience managing and scaling high-performing data teams.
  

US Salary Range
 $200,000—$300,000
 

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.