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Salary: USD 270,000 - 350,000 / annual
Forward Networks, founded in 2013 by Stanford Ph.D.s, has built the industry's first network digital twin—a mathematically accurate model of production networks that enables autonomous networking. The company's platform helps engineers and AI agents understand the impact of every change before it touches production. Global leaders including Goldman Sachs, PayPal, S&P Global, IBM, and Dell use Forward's platform, realizing an average of $14.2 million in annual benefits annually.
You will lead Forward's Applications engineering organization as Senior Director of Engineering, reporting directly to the SVP of Engineering. You 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 systems. A significant majority of the organization is based in India, where the company expects to continue growing.
This is a broad engineering leadership role with end-to-end accountability for 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 the organization builds—not simply execute against a roadmap—bringing engineering judgment into product decisions, challenging requirements and priorities when appropriate, and making pragmatic tradeoffs.
Key responsibilities include: leading and scaling a 40-person engineering organization across two geographies; building a leadership structure with clear ownership and accountability; coaching engineering managers into strong leaders; recruiting and retaining exceptional talent with particular focus on growing the team and leadership bench in India; owning Forward's application development end-to-end from requirements and architecture through implementation, testing, release, and ongoing improvement; partnering with Product Management and UX on product direction, scope, and priorities; establishing realistic plans and driving predictable execution across multiple concurrent initiatives; providing technical leadership across a modern stack (Java backend and Svelte frontend); holding the organization to high standards for performance, scalability, security, maintainability, and user experience; owning release readiness and product quality; driving continuous improvement in engineering practices; and evolving how the organization applies AI across the software development lifecycle to improve engineering productivity and product quality.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 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
- Strong technical background building sophisticated enterprise software, with depth to evaluate architecture and design decisions across backend and frontend systems
- Track record of delivering complex software products with accountability for schedule, quality, and technical outcomes, balancing roadmap delivery against architecture and technical debt
- 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
- 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 (Layer 2/3 protocols, network infrastructure, network security, network visibility and management products)
- Experience applying AI tools across the software development lifecycle and driving adoption across engineering teams
