# Senior Payloads Software Engineer at Forterra

- Company: Forterra
- What the company does: About Forterra At Forterra, we are unleashing autonomy at scale to transform the battlefield. Backed by SoftBank VF.
- Company website: https://www.forterra.com/
- Type: Startups
- Level: Senior
- Location: Clarksburg, MD
- Work setup: On-site
- Pay: $120K to $200K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-05-12
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://ats.rippling.com/forterra/jobs/a76b443d-a7fa-46f3-9eac-eaa34a6c8606
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/forterra-senior-payloads-software-engineer/

## About the role

Forterra is seeking a senior software engineer with a passion for autonomous systems. In this role, you will design, develop, and field software solutions that enable intelligent behavior in robotics and automation technologies. You will directly support real-world missions across our fleet of ground vehicles operated by our national security customers around the world.

## What they're looking for

- Bring payloads into real operations: Integrate and deploy paylaods on customer-bound hardware platforms and validate it in real-world conditions
- Build with users and stakeholders: Work across the organization and directly with end-users to deliver new behaviors, payload integrations, and emerging mission use-cases
- Optimize the full system: Take a holistic view of autonomous vehicle behavior—how sensing, compute, controls, and other subsystems interact—and drive overall performance improvements
- Close the loop from test to deploy: Analyze test results, identify issues and root causes, and collaborate with engineering teams to drive problems to resolution
- Connect product needs to R&D execution: Partner across business development and engineering teams to translate customer requirements into delivered autonomy capabilities
- Travel : Travel ranging from 10-25% and 25-50% depending on candidate preference and role placement. Ability to commute to Arlington, VA as needed

Tags: Emerging Tech