Senior Director of Product Engineering

Forward Networks; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 260,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Top-grade health insurance (medical, 3

Dental and vision coverage

Generous vacation/time-off policy

Job summary

Forward Networks is seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead the Applications engineering organization, spanning backend Java services and a Svelte-based frontend. You will own end-to-end responsibility for people, architecture, delivery, and quality across US and India.

You will partner with Product Management and UX to shape product direction, make pragmatic tradeoffs, and build a scalable leadership structure with strong ownership.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• 5+ years leading engineering teams and managers
• Experience delivering complex software products with accountability for schedule, quality, and technical outcomes
• Experience partnering with Product Management and UX/Design
• Strong written and verbal communication to senior leadership
• Experience building multi-team organizations across US and India

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end application development across backend and frontend
• Own architecture decisions and review designs to guide teams
• Partner with Product Management and UX to shape product direction
• Build scalable leadership structures with clear ownership and fast decision-making
• Recruit, retain, and develop engineering talent across geographies
• Ensure release readiness, product quality, and testing strategies
• Drive AI adoption to improve engineering productivity and product quality
• Coach engineering managers to grow as leaders of people and technology

Skills

Leadership

People management

Architectural judgment

Java backend

Frontend (Svelte)

AI in software development

Communication

Cross-functional collaboration

Strategic planning

Talent development

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Java

Svelte

Job description

• 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
• 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 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
• 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
• 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

Benefits

• We’re an agile team and early-stage company with plenty of opportunities to grow, as a company and as individuals.
• Every team member receives a compensation package that includes equity, so we can grow together.
• We offer top-grade insurance, with medical, dental, and vision benefits for you and your family.
• Vacations, holidays, family days. With no tracked time off, you can go as long as it’s okay with your manager.

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 engineersExperience partnering closely with Product Management and UX/Design, including influencing product requirements, priorities, scope, and strategyA leadership style built around ownership, high standards, transparency, and developing strong leaders10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams and managersTrack 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 investmentsExcellent written and verbal communication, including conveying technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and organizational issues to senior leadershipExperience 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 projectStrong organizational and planning skills across multiple initiatives, dependencies, resources, and risksExperience building on-premises or self-hosted enterprise softwareExperience building applications using Java and modern frontend frameworksExperience leading engineering organizations distributed across the US and IndiaExperience applying AI tools across the software development lifecycle and driving adoption across engineering teamsExperience with networking concepts, including Layer 2/3 protocols, network infrastructure, network security, or network visibility and management products