Senior Director, Product Engineering

forwardnetworks; Santa Clara (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Forward is seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead the Applications engineering organization, overseeing roughly 40 engineers across the US and India. You will own end-to-end product engineering, collaborate with Product Management and UX, and set the technical direction for the customer-facing application layer of the Forward platform.

You will lead through engineering managers, review designs, and mentor leaders while ensuring delivery, quality, and timely releases across geographies.

Responsibilities

• Lead an approx. 40-person engineering organization across the US and India.
• Build a leadership structure that scales with clear ownership and fast decision-making.
• 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.
• 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.
• Establish realistic plans and estimates, identify dependencies and risks early, and drive predictable execution.
• Communicate progress, tradeoffs, risks, and changes clearly to engineering and company leadership.

Job description

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),