Senior Director, Product Engineering

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.