Site Reliability Engineer

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