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. It's the foundation for autonomous networking, giving engineers and AI agents the ability to know the impact of every change before it touches production. That founding instinct still defines how we work. We're accurate and evidence-driven, relentless about clarity, and we'd rather be certain than comfortable, building a groundbreaking platform that transforms how teams run and secure networks across every major cloud and vendor environment.
Global leaders like Goldman Sachs, PayPal, S&P Global, IBM, and Dell trust Forward, alongside fast-growing enterprises and government agencies, realizing an average of $14.2 million in annual benefits, according to IDC. Backed by top-tier investors, including A. Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, MSD Partners, Omega Venture Partners, Section 32, and Threshold Ventures, and headquartered in Santa Clara, we're most proud of our team: curious people who'd rather build what doesn't exist than accept how things have always been done.
Forward is looking for a Site Reliability Engineer
About the Role 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.
If you thrive in environments where you're handed a problem rather than a playbook this role is for you.
What You'll Own
- 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
What We're Looking For
- 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
Nice to Have
- 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 This Role Is Not
- A pure ops or NOC role — you are building and engineering, not just monitoring
- A siloed function — you will be deeply embedded with product and engineering teams
- A ticket-taker — you will be proactively identifying and solving reliability problems before they become incidents
Why Forward
- You'll be building something from scratch at a company with real enterprise traction and world-class investors behind it
- Our customers include some of the most complex network environments on the planet — the reliability bar is high and the work is genuinely interesting
- People-centric culture built by Stanford Ph.D.s who care deeply about doing things the right way
- Competitive compensation, equity, and the opportunity to grow into a leadership role as the SRE function scales
The base pay range for this role is between $230,000 and $250,000. Base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location
Skills Required
- 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.
- Strong fundamentals in networking (TCP/IP, DNS, routing, switching, firewalls, load balancing).
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration in production environments.
- Deep proficiency with observability tooling such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Splunk.
- 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.
- Experience supporting enterprise or federal government customers with high availability requirements.
- Experience as an early or foundational SRE hire at a growth-stage company.
Forward Networks Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Forward Networks and has not been reviewed or approved by Forward Networks.
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Fair & Transparent Compensation — Pay is considered competitive for a mid-stage infrastructure/software company across several roles and locations. Signals point to strong totals in technical and select go-to-market positions.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity is broadly offered to all employees, creating ownership potential alongside salary and bonus. As a private company, perceived value can rise with company performance and future liquidity.
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Healthcare Strength — Medical, dental, and vision coverage is described as top-grade for employees and dependents. Company materials consistently highlight strong core health benefits across hiring channels.
Forward Networks Insights
What We Do
The future of network operations is network modeling. Forward Networks' flagship platform Forward Enterprise gives users a mathematically accurate network digital twin. Forward enables perfect network visibility, full path analysis, security policy verification, and change prediction, freeing up time and saving you money.
