Job Description

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 EngineerAbout 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 OwnDefine and drive SRE practices from the ground up — SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and the frameworks the engineering org will actually useDrive the reliability and operational excellence of the Forward SaaS platformBuild and maintain observability infrastructure — logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting — so the team always knows what's happening before customers doLead incident response: on-call rotations, runbooks, post-mortems, and the follow-through to make sure the same incident doesn't happen twicePartner with engineering teams to embed reliability thinking into the SDLC — capacity planning, load testing, chaos engineering, and production readiness reviewsHelp define and build the SRE team as the company scales — this is a foundational hire with a path to leadershipWhat We're Looking For6+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering in a SaaS or cloud environmentProven experience building or significantly maturing an SRE function — not just operating within one someone else builtStrong fundamentals in networking — TCP/IP, DNS, routing, switching, firewalls, and load balancing. Experience with network management or observability platforms is a significant plusHands-on experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration in production environmentsDeep proficiency with observability tooling — Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, or similarStrong scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or similarExperience 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 improvementsAbility 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 themNice to HaveExperience supporting enterprise or federal government customers with high availability requirementsExperience in a foundational or early SRE hire capacity at a growth stage companyWhat This Role Is NotA pure ops or NOC role — you are building and engineering, not just monitoringA siloed function — you will be deeply embedded with product and engineering teamsA ticket-taker — you will be proactively identifying and solving reliability problems before they become incidentsWhy ForwardYou'll be building something from scratch at a company with real enterprise traction and world-class investors behind itOur customers include some of the most complex network environments on the planet — the reliability bar is high and the work is genuinely interestingPeople-centric culture built by Stanford Ph.D.s who care deeply about doing things the right wayCompetitive compensation, equity, and the opportunity to grow into a leadership role as the SRE function scalesThe base pay range for this role is between $230,000 and $250,000. Base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location

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