---
title: 'Site Reliability Engineer at Forward'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/site-reliability-engineer-forward-santa-clara-0j25dk63fw51'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Site Reliability Engineer at Forward 

- **Company:** Forward 
- **Location:** Santa Clara, CA
- **Posted:** 2026-07-14
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/forwardnetworks/jobs/7800601003

## 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 Site Reliability Engineer

About the Role This is not a "keep the lights on" SRE role. As our first or early SRE hire you will be building the reliability engineering function at Forward — defining how we think about availability, observability, incident response, and operational excellence across a complex, distributed SaaS platform. You will work closely with engineering, infrastructure, and product to ensure our platform meets the reliability bar our enterprise customers demand.

If you thrive in environments where you're handed a problem rather than a playbook this role is for you.

## What You'll Own

- 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 — so the team always knows what's happening before customers do
- Lead incident response: on-call rotations, runbooks, post-mortems, and the follow-through to make sure the same incident doesn't happen twice
- Partner with engineering teams to embed reliability thinking into the SDLC — capacity planning, load testing, chaos engineering, and production readiness reviews
- Help define and build the SRE team as the company scales — this is a foundational hire with a path to leadership

## What We're Looking For

- 6+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering in a SaaS or cloud environment
- Proven experience building or significantly maturing an SRE function — not just operating within one someone else built
- Strong fundamentals in networking — TCP/IP, DNS, routing, switching, firewalls, and load balancing. Experience with network management or observability platforms is a significant plus
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration in production environments
- Deep proficiency with observability tooling — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, or similar
- Strong scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or similar
- Experience with cloud platforms — AWS, GCP, or Azure — including infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent)
- Track record of owning and improving incident response processes including blameless post-mortems and SLO-driven reliability improvements
- Ability to communicate clearly with both engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders — you can explain an outage to a customer-facing team without jargon and explain an SLO to an executive without losing them

## Nice to Have

- Experience supporting enterprise or federal government customers with high availability requirements
- Experience in a foundational or early SRE hire capacity at a growth stage company

What This Role Is Not

- A pure ops or NOC role — you are building and engineering, not just monitoring
- A siloed function — you will be deeply embedded with product and engineering teams
- A ticket-taker — you will be proactively identifying and solving reliability problems before they become incidents

## Why Forward

- You'll be building something from scratch at a company with real enterprise traction and world-class investors behind it
- Our customers include some of the most complex network environments on the planet — the reliability bar is high and the work is genuinely interesting
- People-centric culture built by Stanford Ph.D.s who care deeply about doing things the right way
- Competitive compensation, equity, and the opportunity to grow into a leadership role as the SRE function scales

The base pay range for this role is between $230,000 and $250,000. Base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location

## 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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