---
title: 'Senior Director, Product Engineering at Forward'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-director-product-engineering-forward-santa-clara-03fs56jgn3hj'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-15'
---

# Senior Director, Product Engineering at Forward 

- **Company:** Forward 
- **Location:** Santa Clara, CA
- **Posted:** 2026-09-10
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-15
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/forwardnetworks/jobs/7991521003

## 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), 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.

## About Forward 

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Forward Networks provides a vendor-agnostic "digital twin" software platform that creates a mathematically accurate model of an enterprise's entire hybrid network, enabling teams to verify changes, improve security, and accelerate troubleshooting.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series D)
- **Headquarters**: Santa Clara, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2013
- **Founders**: David Erickson, Nikhil Handigol, Brandon Heller, Peyman Kazemian

## Core Business
- **Primary industry/industries**: Computer Networking Products, Network Management Software, Network Security
- **Target customers**: B2B, primarily large enterprises (including Fortune 50 institutions), financial services, global entertainment companies, and top-level US federal government agencies.
- **Mission or purpose statement**: To transform networks to be more reliable, agile, and secure by providing a single source of verified truth for how a network actually behaves.

## Products & Services
- **Forward Enterprise**: The core platform, a network digital twin. It builds a mathematically accurate model of every device, path, and policy across a hybrid network (on-premises and cloud). Used by networking, security, cloud, and compliance teams for change management, compliance audits, and troubleshooting.
- **Forward AI**: Built on the Forward Enterprise digital twin, this feature allows users to ask the twin questions in natural language to validate changes, understand network behavior, and act with confidence.
- **Forward Predict**: A newer offering built on the digital twin that allows users to predict the outcome of changes before they are implemented, answering "what if" scenarios.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: **Total Funding**: $112.1 million across four rounds. **Annual Revenue**: Approximately $15.0 million (estimated).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, MSD Partners, Threshold Ventures. Customers include Goldman Sachs, PayPal, S&P Global, IBM, and Dell.
- **Growth Signals**: The company has been in the market for over 10 years, has won 25+ industry awards, and supports 30+ vendors. It has a presence in 6 countries (including India, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and France). Employee headcount is around 199 with monthly growth of +0.4%.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Mathematically Accurate Digital Twin**: The core technology is a mathematically precise model of the network, which is a significant differentiator from competitors that use simpler or less accurate modeling methods.
- **Vendor-Agnostic**: The platform works across all major cloud and vendor environments (e.g., A10, Arista, Cisco, F5, Fortinet, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, AWS, GCP), providing a single source of truth for multi-vendor networks.
- **Strong Investor & Customer Base**: Backed by top-tier venture capital firms and trusted by some of the world's most demanding and complex networks, including major financial institutions and government agencies.

## Strategic Focus
- **AI and Predictive Analysis**: The company is heavily investing in AI capabilities (Forward AI) and predictive modeling (Forward Predict) to move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive network management.
- **Expanding Platform Capabilities**: Continuing to build out the digital twin platform to serve more use cases for different teams (networking, security, cloud, compliance) and to handle increasingly complex hybrid environments.
- **Market Penetration**: Leveraging a strong base of referenceable Fortune 500 and government clients to expand its footprint and grow its customer base.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & Mission**: Described as a "people-centric, innovative culture" where "brilliant minds are shaping the future of network reliability, security, and AI-ready operations." The company emphasizes that it is an "agile team and early-stage company with plenty of opportunities to grow."
- **Remote/Hybrid Policy**: The company offers remote positions (e.g., a Customer Care Engineer role listed for Australia). The specific policy for all roles is likely flexible and depends on the team and location.
- **Notable Perks & Benefits**:
    - **Compensation**: Competitive pay and equity packages.
    - **Health & Wellness**: Top-grade medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families.
    - **Time Off**: No tracked time off for vacations, holidays, and family days (with manager approval).
    - **Growth**: Opportunities for professional growth within an agile, early-stage company environment.
- **Engineering Culture**: Founded by four Stanford Ph.D.s, the company has a strong technical foundation. The work involves solving complex problems at scale for the world's most demanding networks, which would appeal to engineers who enjoy deep technical challenges.

## Sources
1. [forwardnetworks.com - Careers](https://www.forwardnetworks.com/careers/)
2. [forwardnetworks.com - About](https://www.forwardnetworks.com/about/)
3. [forwardnetworks.com - Homepage](https://www.forwardnetworks.com/)
4. [linkedin.com - Forward Networks](https://www.linkedin.com/company/forward-networks)
5. [job-boards.greenhouse.io - Forward Networks](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/forwardnetworks/jobs/7714534003)

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