FORT brings together the best technologists who have spent their careers working to solve the most complex and dangerous aspects of robotics.
The company was founded in 2018 by Samuel Reeves, who spent the previous decade making landmine clearance safer through robotics. During this time, Reeves realized that secure communications - considered core infrastructure elsewhere in technology - didn't exist for robots in fields like construction, agriculture, warehousing, or elsewhere.
FORT was founded to create a first-of-its-kind Robotics Control Platform (RCP) to empower companies with unique tools to ensure robots cause no harm.
As the Team Lead of the System Integration & Test (SI&T), you will lead a quality-focused test team to join our team and help us build the future for autonomous mobile robots. This team is responsible for validating the FORT product portfolio. The FORT products combine hardware, software, and cloud applications to create the FORT Safety and Security Platform for smart machines. This individual will be a hands-on technical leader with experience executing system-wide end-to-end tests and writing test automation.
In addition to testing the FORT products, this role will contribute to the overall product development life cycle methodology, establish product release criteria, coordinate closely with the development and product management teams, and enforce the definition of done for product development tasks.
This individual will know commonly used concepts, practices, and procedures within the software & hardware quality assurance fields. Demonstrated skills in an agile development environment. Relies on experience and judgment to plan and accomplish goals.
Principle Responsibilities

• Collaborate with internal and external hardware and software design teams to identify, debug, and resolve new firmware and electrical hardware issues to ensure high-quality product releases.
• Mentor team members, perform test code reviews, and increase the team's automation skills. Drive the use of best practices across all delivery teams.
• Direct and develop a team of professionals, ensuring strategic alignment with company goals.
• Mentor team members to foster skill development and career growth, creating pathways for advancement within the organization.
• Lead by example in a hands-on technical capacity, promoting a culture of accountability and innovation.
• Conduct performance reviews, set objectives, and implement team-building exercises to enhance cohesion and efficiency.
• Develop software to introduce and improve automation as part of an end-to-end test framework.
• Work with manufacturing partners to develop and document production factory test processes, including specific test hardware and automation software.
• Provide feedback to the team on product quality, call out risks/issues (if any), and balance quality and time bounds with a release perspective.
• Help establish quality metrics and work with the team to achieve improvement goals.
• Work with engineering leaders to create accurate schedules within capacity constraints.
• Ready to work on a fast-paced, distributed team doing frequent releases

Secondary Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers at customer sites to help drive customer success through direct enablement. This could involve 10-20% travel for the team.
• Oversee the RMA team and track related quality metrics.
• Coordinate with the Cloud team to test and automate end-to-end scenarios.

Qualifications

• An engineer with 5-8 years experience designing and implementing manual and automated tests for complex embedded products
• 3 years of technical leadership experience when it comes to mentoring & developing a team
• Adept at understanding complex systems and able to use that knowledge to assist in diagnosing and debugging issues
• Advanced experience in software development using Python/similar tools and other languages/infrastructures/integration testing frameworks
• Experience in automating test processes with laboratory equipment
• Proficient in debugging and testing hardware and software systems using laboratory test equipment such as oscilloscopes, meters, and power supplies
• Experienced with both wired (Ethernet) and wireless (BLE, Wi-Fi, LTE) networking technologies preferred
• Exposure to test automation pipeline automation, including modern cloud continuous integration pipelines
• Preferred degree in electrical engineering, computer science, computer engineering, or a related field

Increasingly, today's worksites require people and machines to collaborate side by side. To ensure control amid increasing automation, FORT's platform is safe, secure, and dynamic in ways that can't be achieved by legacy controls or next-gen AI.
Autonomous machines hold great promise but present new and serious risks. FORT minimizes those risks by ensuring communications integrity over any network - allowing customers to rest assured that their most valuable assets, people, data, and machines are always safe and secure.