Senior Technical Marketing Engineer – Network Automation

Forward was founded in 2013 by four Stanford Ph.D.s, building the industry's first network digital twin: a mathematically accurate model of the production network.

We are seeking a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer (Network Automation) to help drive adoption and understanding of Forward's automation capabilities across customers, partners, and the broader network engineering community.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Product Management to define, validate, and shape automation-related capabilities and use cases.
• Design and evangelize customer workflows that realize the value of automation features, including NQE (Network Query Engine), APIs, and CI/CD-driven verification.
• Enhance existing product integrations and build new ones to expand automation and interoperability across the broader network and IT ecosystem.
• Build and maintain lab environments to support demos, technical validation, and automation use-case exploration.
• Develop high-quality technical collateral for internal audiences, including training materials, demo guides, and sales enablement content.
• Collaborate with Marketing to create external-facing assets such as whitepapers, solution briefs, blogs, presentations, and videos.
• Enable Sales and Solutions teams with automation-focused demos, messaging, and technical training.
• Represent Forward at customer meetings, webinars, and industry events, including networking and automation conferences and trade shows.
• Contribute thought leadership on network automation trends and Forward's role in modern NetDevOps and intent-based networking architectures.
• Gather field and market feedback to influence product roadmap and automation positioning.

Required Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience as a Technical Marketing Engineer, Sales Engineer, Network Engineer, or similar customer-facing technical role.
• Strong understanding of enterprise networking concepts, including routing, switching, and network change management.
• Experience with NetDevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, or infrastructure-as-code workflows applied to networking.
• Familiarity with source control (Git), API integration, and building automation against network data models.
• Hands-on experience with network automation tooling and frameworks (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, Python, REST APIs, or similar).
• Experience working with complex enterprise networks across on-prem, virtualized, and cloud environments.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform and familiarity with virtualization and containerized environments.
• Proven ability to build and operate lab environments for demos and technical validation.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to explain complex concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Networking, or a related field.
• Ability to work effectively across Product, Sales, and Marketing teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Working knowledge of data query and transformation languages (e.g., GraphQL, JSONPath, or a query engine such as Forward's NQE).
• Familiarity with AI/ML concepts and hands-on experience exploring AI-driven use cases in network operations or data analysis.
• Working knowledge of Linux administration.
• Familiarity with Forward or similar network visibility, verification, or analytics platforms.
• Experience presenting at conferences, webinars, or customer-facing technical events.

The base pay range for this role is between $200,000 and $230,000.