Senior Director, Product Engineering

Forward•Santa Clara, CA

2h•$270,000 - $350,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Forward is seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead its Applications engineering organization. This role reports directly to the SVP of Engineering and will oversee an organization of approximately 40 engineers across the US and India, responsible for the customer-facing application layer of the Forward platform, including both backend and frontend development. The majority of the team is based in India, with plans for continued growth there. This is a comprehensive leadership position with end-to-end accountability for people, architecture, execution, quality, and delivery. The role involves leading through engineering managers and senior technical leaders, while maintaining technical depth to review designs, challenge architectural decisions, and assist teams with complex technical issues. Collaboration with Product Management and UX is key to shaping product development, influencing product decisions, and making pragmatic tradeoffs.

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 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 Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.