{"id":802386,"url":"https://alion.io/job/forwardnetworks-site-reliability-engineer","title":"Site Reliability Engineer","company":{"id":673334,"name":"Forward Networks","domain":"forwardnetworks.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/forwardnetworks","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":84,"open_postings":9,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.444,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":64,"computed_at":"2026-11-01T06:10:25Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Santa Clara, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":151000,"max_usd":288000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":1808},"experience_years_min":6,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Ansible","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Chaos Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Datadog","optional":false},{"name":"Digital Twin","optional":false},{"name":"DNS","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Grafana","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Prometheus","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":false},{"name":"Splunk","optional":false},{"name":"SRE","optional":false},{"name":"TCP/IP","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-14T21:11:33Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-09","last_verified_at":"2026-11-02T04:12:26Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":110,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":110},"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.\nGlobal 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.\nForward is looking for a Site Reliability Engineer\nAbout 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.\nIf you thrive in environments where you're handed a problem rather than a playbook this role is for you.\nWhat You'll Own\nDefine and drive SRE practices from the ground up - SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and the frameworks the engineering org will actually use\nDrive the reliability and operational excellence of the Forward SaaS platform\nBuild and maintain observability infrastructure - logging, metrics, tracing, and alerting - so the team always knows what's happening before customers do\nLead incident response: on-call rotations, runbooks, post-mortems, and the follow-through to make sure the same incident doesn't happen twice\nPartner with engineering teams to embed reliability thinking into the SDLC - capacity planning, load testing, chaos engineering, and production readiness reviews\nHelp define and build the SRE team as the company scales - this is a foundational hire with a path to leadership\nWhat We're Looking For\n6+ years of experience in site reliability engineering, DevOps, or infrastructure engineering in a SaaS or cloud environment\nProven experience building or significantly maturing an SRE function - not just operating within one someone else built\nStrong fundamentals in networking - TCP/IP, DNS, routing, switching, firewalls, and load balancing. Experience with network management or observability platforms is a significant plus\nHands-on experience with Kubernetes and container orchestration in production environments\nDeep proficiency with observability tooling - Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, or similar\nStrong scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or similar\nExperience with cloud platforms - AWS, GCP, or Azure - including infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible, or equivalent)\nTrack record of owning and improving incident response processes including blameless post-mortems and SLO-driven reliability improvements\nAbility 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\nNice to Have\nExperience supporting enterprise or federal government customers with high availability requirements\nExperience in a foundational or early SRE hire capacity at a growth stage company\nWhat This Role Is Not\nA pure ops or NOC role - you are building and engineering, not just monitoring\nA siloed function - you will be deeply embedded with product and engineering teams\nA ticket-taker - you will be proactively identifying and solving reliability problems before they become incidents\nWhy Forward\nYou'll be building something from scratch at a company with real enterprise traction and world-class investors behind it\nOur customers include some of the most complex network environments on the planet - the reliability bar is high and the work is genuinely interesting\nPeople-centric culture built by Stanford Ph.D.s who care deeply about doing things the right way\nCompetitive compensation, equity, and the opportunity to grow into a leadership role as the SRE function scales\nThe base pay range for this role is between $230,000 and $250,000. 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