Senior Director of Product Engineering, Forward Networks

• 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

Desirable

• Forward is looking for a Senior Director of Engineering to lead our Applications engineering organization
• Reporting directly to the SVP of Engineering, you will own an organization of approximately 40 engineers across the US and India responsible for the customer-facing application layer of the Forward platform, spanning both backend and frontend. A significant majority of the organization is based in India, where we expect to continue growing
• This is a broad engineering leadership role with end-to-end accountability for the organization: people, architecture, execution, quality, and delivery
• You will lead through engineering managers and senior technical leaders while remaining close enough to the technology to review designs, challenge architectural decisions, and help teams navigate difficult technical problems
• You will partner closely with Product Management and UX to shape what we build—not simply execute against a roadmap—bringing engineering judgment into product decisions, challenging requirements and priorities when appropriate, and making pragmatic tradeoffs
• 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 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
• 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
• 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