Lead RF Data Scientist

The posting, as Forterra wrote it

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
Forterra is building RF statistical-learning techniques for difficult, real-world sensing environments. The work combines signal processing, statistical learning, and carefully designed experiments to recognize and understand signals in conditions where clean textbook data is not enough.

We are hiring a technical research lead who wants to make a visible impact. You will take ambitious ideas from mathematical formulation through working techniques, testing, and operationally relevant evaluation. You will work closely with RF and DSP engineers, platform engineers, and analysts who use the results. The goal is not research for its own sake: it is to create capabilities that are useful, understandable, and dependable when they matter.

This is a hands-on, mid-career applied-research role for someone who enjoys moving between signal processing, statistical learning, numerical methods, and experimental design. You should be excited by hard, imperfect data; eager to learn from failures; and motivated to see your work shape real systems.
What you'll do

• Lead RF technique development for detection, classification, parameter estimation, and understanding complex signal environments. Choose methods that fit the problem rather than treating a neural network as the default answer.
• Define technique inputs, targets, loss functions, uncertainty outputs, and decision rules for real RF collections. Account for sample rate, bandwidth, channel and receiver effects, incomplete labels, interference, and overlapping or confusable signals.
• Build a disciplined data practice: versioned datasets and splits, label quality rules, leakage checks, and reproducible training and evaluation recipes. Make synthetic, simulated, and collected data distinguishable in every result.
• Design synthetic and hybrid data generation that exercises the technique's intended operating envelope, then characterize where synthetic performance does and does not transfer to collected data.
• Run training and ablation studies; diagnose failures as data, labeling, representation, optimization, technique, or evaluation problems; and make the next experiment smaller and more informative.
• Establish mea

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ing:

• 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.

CLEARANCE ELIGIBILITY - This position may require eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance. For more information about U.S. Security Clearances: click here .
Forterra is an equal-opportunity employer, providing and promoting equal employment opportunity in all personnel practices. 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 applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any factor, including veteran and disability status, and criminal history, in accordance with applicable local, state, and federal laws.
Forterra is also committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. Please let your recruiter know if you need an accommodation at any point during the interview process.
To see Forterra’s candidate data privacy policy, please visit Forterra Legal | Job Applicant Privacy Notice .