Site Reliability Engineer, Forward Networks
$230-250k
Office located in Santa Clara, CA
Mathematically-accurate network modeling
Be an early applicant
Mathematically-accurate network modeling
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$230-250k
Office located in Santa Clara, CA
201-500 employees
Company mission
To transform networks to be agile, predictable, and secure.
Role
Who you are
- If you thrive in environments where you're handed a problem rather than a playbook this role is for you
- 6+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering in a SaaS or cloud environment
- Proven experience building or significantly maturing an SRE function — not just operating within one someone else built
- Strong fundamentals in networking — TCP/IP, DNS, routing, switching, firewalls, and load balancing. Experience with network management or observability platforms is a significant plus
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration in production environments
- Deep proficiency with observability tooling — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, or similar
- Strong scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or similar
- Experience with cloud platforms — AWS, GCP, or Azure — including infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent)
- Track record of owning and improving incident response processes including blameless post-mortems and SLO-driven reliability improvements
- Ability to communicate clearly with both engineering teams and non-technical stakeholders — you can explain an outage to a customer-facing team without jargon and explain an SLO to an executive without losing them
Desirable
- Experience supporting enterprise or federal government customers with high availability requirements
- Experience in a foundational or early SRE hire capacity at a growth stage company
What the job involves
- This is not a "keep the lights on" SRE role
- As our first or early SRE hire you will be building the reliability engineering function at Forward — defining how we think about availability, observability, incident response, and operational excellence across a complex, distributed SaaS platform
- You will work closely with engineering, infrastructure, and product to ensure our platform meets the reliability bar our enterprise customers demand
- Define and drive SRE practices from the ground up — SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and the frameworks the engineering org will actually use
- Drive the reliability and operational excellence of the Forward SaaS platform
- Build and maintain observability infrastructure — logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting — so the team always knows what's happening before customers do
- Lead incident response: on-call rotations, runbooks, post-mortems, and the follow-through to make sure the same incident doesn't happen twice
- Partner with engineering teams to embed reliability thinking into the SDLC — capacity planning, load testing, chaos engineering, and production readiness reviews
- Help define and build the SRE team as the company scales — this is a foundational hire with a path to leadership
Our take
The rapid flow of data from inside and outside organisations has rendered top-down planning difficult, and often ineffective, especially in an enterprise network setting. Forward Networks provides a solution by creating digital twins of a company's network architecture so planners and developers can see how their activities will affect operations across the entire network.
Although digital twinning is relatively new, there is already intense competition for this space. Forward Networks has carved out a unique niche in focusing on enterprise networks rather than the organisation as a whole, a focus which is needed given the complexity of modern hybrid networks which can span several cloud environments.
In 2023, Forward Networks completed a Series D funding round led by MSD Partners, with participation from Goldman Sachs, one of its long-term customers. This investment has supported the business in further developing its product, expand the services available to its customers, and scaling its core team.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
95% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Jan 2023
$50m
SERIES D
Oct 2019
$35m
SERIES C
Total funding: $112.5m
Company 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.
Company HQ
Santa Clara, CA
Leadership
David Erickson
(Co-Founder & CEO)Was Director of Course Content and Instructor at SDN Academy, a Graduate Research Assistant at Stanford University and Member of Technical Staff at big switch networks.
Brandon Heller
(Co-Founder & CTO)Was Director of Course Content and Instructor at SDN Academy. Prior to that, they interned at Google, Hewlett-Packard and Emerson Motor Company.
Nikhil Handigol
(Co-Founder & Chief AI Officer)Was Director of Course Content and Instructor at SDN Academy, as well as a Member of Technical Staff at ON.Lab and Research Assistant at Stanford University.
Peyman Kazemian
(Co-Founder)Was Director of Course Content and Instructor at SDN Academy, and a Researcher and Teaching Assistant at Stanford University. Also in terned at Google and Ericsson.
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