Senior Technical Product Manager - Perception - Military veterans preferred

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

Our autonomous vehicle (AV) platform is delivering real value to real customers today. As a Product team, our mission is to ensure we're solving the right needs, in the right order, to the right scope. Technical Product Managers (TPdMs) play a critical role in translating the broader product vision into actionable roadmaps and high-quality execution within their domains. TPdMs are embedded with engineering teams and help ensure their team's work aligns with real user needs, technical constraints, and company priorities.

As a Technical Product Manager for Perception, you'll work alongside a world-class team of engineers developing the software that allows our vehicles to see, understand, and reason about their environments—including detection, classification, tracking, and scene understanding from LiDAR, EO/IR cameras, radar, and other sensors.

This role requires a seasoned TPdM who can operate at multiple levels—zooming out to understand customer goals and roadmap alignment, and zooming in to clarify requirements, review designs, or assess results of our product in the field. TPdMs are accountable for clarity, progress, and impact. You'll own your team's backlog & roadmap, help define the success metrics, and ensure cross-functional stakeholders are aligned along the way. You must be proactive, detail-oriented, and fluent in both product thinking and technical execution.



What You'll Do

• Own the Roadmap for Your Area: Define the customer, value, and success metrics for your part of the product. Make sure the work being done is the best way to deliver that value.

• Drive Alignment: Create user journeys, diagrams, and other artifacts to clarify priorities and align stakeholders internal and external to your team.

• Shape Execution: Translate ambiguous goals into clear, prioritized work. Write detailed feature descriptions and acceptance criteria that enable execution.

• Prioritize Ruthlessly: Intake and triage product improvements. Balance customer impact, technical effort, and business needs in prioritizing your backlog.

• Communicate Proactively: Keep engineering, product leadership, growth, and other stakeholders informed. Share progress, flag issues, and raise tradeoffs early.

• Measure Progress and Value: Define KPIs, evaluate work against roadmap goals, and ensure your team is maximizing impact.

• Validate Delivery: Work closely with engineering to ensure what's built meets the intended scope and quality. Accept completed work based on clear criteria.

• Support Agile Rhythm: As a Product Owner, partner with Scrum Masters to shape sprint goals and contribute to sprint reviews.

• Escalate When Needed: Raise scope or timeline risks to Product Leadership to support decision-making.

• Champion Your Team: Evangelize successes and ensure the value your team delivers is visible across the organization.

Qualifications

• 5–8+ years of technical product management experience, ideally in perception, AVs, or robotics.

• You're comfortable operating at both strategic and tactical levels—able to align with business goals and get specific with technical teams.

• Strong product instincts—able to connect field needs and platform constraints to tactical engineering priorities.

• Experience working in highly technical domains like sensor fusion, computer vision, SLAM, semantic segmentation, or deep learning-based detection and classification.

• You're technical enough to earn the trust of engineers, hold your own in brainstorming sessions, and ensure feasibility.

• Deep familiarity with product development in systems with high performance, latency, and robustness requirements.

• You communicate clearly across roles—from engineers to executives—and thrive in cross-functional environments.

• You're rigorous about execution and care deeply that what's being built works for the user in the real world.

Preferred Qualifications

• Background in software engineering, hardware development, robotics, or autonomy

• Familiarity with agile environments and tools like Jira

• Experience in fast-paced or startup environments, especially building 0-to-1 products

US Salary Range
$150,000—$190,000

Location

Up to 20% travel may be required to support field testing or customer deployments.

Preference for hybrid candidates near Forterra's core offices: Clarksburg, MD; Orlando, FL; Palo Alto, CA; or Boston, MA.

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.

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