# Senior Director, Product Engineering

**Company:** [Forward Networks](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/forward-networks)
**Location:** Unspecified
**Role:** Engineering Management
**Salary:** $270k – $350k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Java, Svelte, Frontend Development, Backend Development, Software Architecture, Enterprise Software, Automated Testing, Performance Engineering, Application Security, Network Security, Artificial Intelligence, Layer 2/3 Protocols, Product Management, UX Design, Technical Debt
**Posted:** 2026-09-10

> Leads a 40-person applications engineering organization across the US and India, owning people development, architecture, delivery, quality, and technical strategy. Requires 10+ years of software engineering experience and 5+ years leading engineering teams and managers.

## Job Description

## 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 scalable leadership structure with clear ownership, accountability, and fast decision-making across regions.
- Coach and develop engineering managers into strong leaders of people, technology, and execution.
- Recruit, retain, and develop exceptional talent, with particular focus on growing the team and leadership bench in India.
- Foster ownership, technical excellence, accountability, continuous improvement, context, and autonomy.

### Own Product Engineering and Delivery
- Own application development end to end, from 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, and drive predictable execution across concurrent initiatives.
- Communicate progress, tradeoffs, risks, and changes to engineering and company leadership.

### Drive Technical Excellence and Quality
- Provide technical leadership across Java backend services and Svelte-based frontend applications by reviewing designs, evaluating tradeoffs, and guiding scalable, maintainable solutions.
- Partner with Distinguished Engineers and senior technical leaders on architecture and engineering standards.
- Maintain high standards for performance, scalability, security, maintainability, and user experience.
- Own release readiness and product quality, including feature validation, automated testing, regression coverage, performance, security, and production readiness.
- Partner with QA on test strategy, plans, and automation.
- Improve design reviews, code reviews, development workflows, and release processes using defects, production issues, and customer feedback to drive systemic improvements.

### Build an AI-Native Engineering Organization
- Evolve the use of AI across coding, testing, debugging, code review, and design.
- Encourage AI-assisted development experimentation while establishing practices that measurably improve engineering outcomes.

## 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 its leadership structure through managers and senior individual contributors.
- Strong technical background building sophisticated enterprise software, with the ability to evaluate architecture and design across backend and frontend systems.
- Track record delivering complex software products with accountability for schedule, quality, and technical outcomes.
- Experience balancing roadmap delivery with architecture, technical debt, and long-term engineering investment.
- Experience partnering with Product Management and UX/Design to influence requirements, priorities, scope, and strategy.
- Strong organizational and planning skills across initiatives, dependencies, resources, and risks.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including communicating technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and organizational issues to senior leadership.
- Leadership style centered on ownership, high standards, transparency, and developing strong leaders.

## Nice-to-Haves
- Experience building on-premises or self-hosted enterprise software.
- Experience leading engineering organizations distributed across the US and India.
- Experience building applications with Java and modern frontend frameworks.
- Experience with networking concepts, including Layer 2/3 protocols, network infrastructure, network security, or network visibility and management products.
- Experience applying AI tools across the software development lifecycle and driving adoption across engineering teams.

## Compensation and Benefits
- Base salary: $270,000–$350,000 per year.
- Annualized bonus in addition to base salary.
- Regular, full-time position.
- Santa Clara-based employees work from the office two days per week; remote candidates in the United States are also considered.
- Occasional travel, including approximately 1–2 trips to India per year.

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