# Senior Director, Product Engineering

**Company**: Forward
**Location**: Santa Clara, CA
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $270,000 – $350,000 per year
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/forwardnetworks/jobs/7991521003?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_586d7ca4-e48

## Description

Forward is looking for a Senior Director of Engineering to lead its Applications engineering organization.

The successful candidate will own an organization of approximately 40 engineers across the US and India, responsible for the customer-facing application layer of the Forward platform.

### 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.

- 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.

- Create a culture of ownership, technical excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement.

#### 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.

- Establish realistic plans and estimates, identify dependencies and risks early, and drive predictable execution.

- 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.

- 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.

- Own release readiness and product quality , feature validation, automated testing, regression coverage, performance, security, production readiness.

- Drive continuous improvement in engineering practices.

#### Build an AI-Native Engineering Organization

- Continue evolving how the organization applies AI across the software development lifecycle.

- Encourage experimentation with AI-assisted development while establishing practices that produce measurable improvements.

### 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.

- Strong technical background building sophisticated enterprise software.

- Track record of delivering complex software products with accountability for schedule, quality, and technical outcomes.

- Experience partnering closely with Product Management and UX/Design.

- Strong organizational and planning skills across multiple initiatives.

- Excellent written and verbal communication.

- 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.

- Experience applying AI tools across the software development lifecycle.

### Location and Compensation

This is a regular, full-time position with Forward, headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The base salary range is $270,000 – $350,000 per year.

## Skills

### Required
- software engineering
- engineering leadership
- enterprise software
- product management
- UX/Design
- technical leadership
- Java
- frontend frameworks
- AI tools

### Nice to have
- on-premises or self-hosted enterprise software
- distributed engineering organizations
- networking concepts
- AI-assisted development

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Source: [Apply at job-boards.greenhouse.io](https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/forwardnetworks/jobs/7991521003?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)