Foundational SRE: Build Reliability for SaaS Platform

Forward; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Forward is seeking its first dedicated SRE to build the reliability function for a distributed SaaS platform. You will define SLOs/SLIs, drive incident response, and partner with engineering, infrastructure, and product to meet enterprise reliability standards.

If you thrive when handed challenging problems rather than following a playbook, this foundational role offers a path to leadership as Forward scales its platform and observability capabilities across cloud environments.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of site reliability engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering in a SaaS or cloud environment.
• Proven experience building or maturing an SRE function.
• Strong networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, routing, load balancing).
• Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration.
• Deep proficiency with observability tooling.
• Scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or similar.
• Experience with cloud platforms and infrastructure as code.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive SRE practices from the ground up — SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and the frameworks the engineering org will actually use.
• Drive the reliability and operational excellence of the Forward SaaS platform.
• Build and maintain observability infrastructure — logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting.
• Lead incident response: on-call rotations, runbooks, post-mortems, and follow-through to prevent repeats.
• Partner with engineering teams to embed reliability thinking into the SDLC — capacity planning and production readiness reviews.
• Help define and build the SRE team as the company scales — foundational hire with a path to leadership.

Skills

SRE experience

Networking fundamentals

Scripting

Incident response

Communication

Tools

Kubernetes

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

Splunk

Python

Bash

Terraform

Ansible

Job description

Forward is seeking its first dedicated SRE to build the reliability function for a distributed SaaS platform. You will define SLOs/SLIs, drive incident response, and partner with engineering, infrastructure, and product to meet enterprise reliability standards.

If you thrive when handed challenging problems rather than following a playbook, this foundational role offers a path to leadership as Forward scales its platform and observability capabilities across cloud environments.