Senior Director, Product Engineering

Forward was founded in 2013 by four Stanford Ph.D.s, building the industry's first network digital twin: a mathematically accurate model of the production network. It's the foundation for autonomous networking, giving engineers and AI agents the ability to know the impact of every change before it touches production. That founding instinct still defines how we work. We're accurate and evidence-driven, relentless about clarity, and we'd rather be certain than comfortable, building a groundbreaking platform that transforms how teams run and secure networks across every major cloud and vendor environment.

Global leaders like Goldman Sachs, PayPal, S&P Global, IBM, and Dell trust Forward, alongside fast-growing enterprises and government agencies, realizing an average of $14.2 million in annual benefits, according to IDC. Backed by top-tier investors, including A. Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, MSD Partners, Omega Venture Partners, Section 32, and Threshold Ventures, and headquartered in Santa Clara, we're most proud of our team: curious people who'd rather build what doesn't exist than accept how things have always been done.

Forward is looking for a Senior Director of Engineering to lead our Applications engineering organization. Reporting directly to the SVP of Engineering, you will own an organization of approximately 40 engineers across the US and India responsible for the customer-facing application layer of the Forward platform, spanning both backend and frontend. A significant majority of the organization is based in India, where we expect to continue growing.

This is a broad engineering leadership role with end-to-end accountability for the organization: people, architecture, execution, quality, and delivery. You will lead through engineering managers and senior technical leaders while remaining close enough to the technology to review designs, challenge architectural decisions, and help teams navigate difficult technical problems. You will partner closely with Product Management and UX to shape what we build—not simply execute against a roadmap—bringing engineering judgment into product decisions, challenging requirements and priorities when appropriate, and making pragmatic tradeoffs.

What You’ll Do

Lead and Scale the Applications Organization

• Lead an approximately 40-person engineering organization across the US and India, including engineering managers and senior technical leaders.
• Build a leadership structure that scales, with clear ownership, accountability, and fast decision-making — including operating practices that let each region decide and deliver without depending unnecessarily on the other.
• Coach and develop engineering managers into strong leaders of people, technology, and execution.
• Recruit, retain, and develop exceptional talent and build a cohesive engineering culture across geographies and time zones, with particular focus on growing the team and the leadership bench in India.
• Create a culture of ownership, technical excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement, and give teams the context and autonomy to execute effectively.

Own Product Engineering and Delivery

• Own Forward's application development end to end: requirements and architecture through implementation, testing, release, and ongoing improvement.
• Partner with Product Management and UX on product direction, scope, priorities, and delivery plans, constructively challenging assumptions and proposing alternatives that lead to better customer or business outcomes.
• Establish realistic plans and estimates, identify dependencies and risks early, and drive predictable execution across multiple concurrent initiatives.
• Communicate progress, tradeoffs, risks, and changes clearly to engineering and company leadership.

Drive Technical Excellence and Quality

• Provide technical leadership across a modern application stack, including Java backend services and Svelte-based frontend applications. This is not a coding role, but you should be comfortable reviewing designs, asking difficult technical questions, evaluating tradeoffs, and guiding teams toward scalable, maintainable solutions.
• Partner closely with Distinguished Engineers and other senior technical leaders to establish and evolve architecture and engineering standards.
• Hold the organization to high standards for performance, scalability, security, maintainability, and user experience, balancing product velocity against technical investment so that short-term decisions do not compromise long-term product health.
• Own release readiness and product quality — feature validation, automated testing, regression coverage, performance, security, production readiness — as an engineering responsibility throughout the development lifecycle, partnering with our dedicated QA organization on test strategy, plans, and automation.
• Drive continuous improvement in engineering practices (design reviews, code reviews, development workflows, release processes), and use defects, production issues, and customer feedback to identify systemic improvements rather than isolated fixes.

Build an AI-Native Engineering Organization

• Continue evolving how the organization applies AI across the software development lifecycle — coding, testing, debugging, code review, and design — to improve engineering productivity and product quality.
• Encourage experimentation with AI-assisted development while establishing practices that produce measurable improvements in engineering outcomes.

What We’re Looking For

Required

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams and managers.
• Experience leading a sizable, multi-team engineering organization and scaling both the organization and its leadership structure, working through managers and senior individual contributors rather than direct involvement in every project.
• Strong technical background building sophisticated enterprise software, with the depth to evaluate architecture and design decisions across backend and frontend systems and effectively challenge senior engineers.
• Track record of delivering complex software products with accountability for schedule, quality, and technical outcomes, balancing roadmap delivery against architecture, technical debt, and longer-term engineering investments.
• Experience partnering closely with Product Management and UX/Design, including influencing product requirements, priorities, scope, and strategy.
• Strong organizational and planning skills across multiple initiatives, dependencies, resources, and risks.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including conveying technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and organizational issues to senior leadership.
• A leadership style built around ownership, high standards, transparency, and developing strong leaders.

Nice to Have

• Experience building on-premises or self-hosted enterprise software.
• Experience leading engineering organizations distributed across the US and India.
• Experience building applications using Java and modern frontend frameworks.
• Experience with networking concepts, including Layer 2/3 protocols, network infrastructure, network security, or network visibility and management products.
• Experience applying AI tools across the software development lifecycle and driving adoption across engineering teams.

Location

This is a regular, full-time position with Forward. Our headquarters are in Santa Clara, California; employees based near the office currently work from the office two days per week. We are also open to remote candidates in the United States. The role requires occasional travel, including approximately 1–2 trips to India per year.

Base Salary Range:  $270,000 – $350,000 per year
This range represents the low and high end of the salary for this position. Actual compensation will vary based on factors including location, candidate experience, skills, and level. In addition to the base salary, you will also receive an annualized bonus.