Senior Director of Product Engineering

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

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Worksite address

santa clara, CA, 95053, US

Who can apply

Review the original listing for work authorization, qualifications and employer requirements.