Senior Software Engineer - Backend
Content + Source + Freshness • 11 Dec 2025 • 95% confidence
Offer value
High value due to strong industry recognition, impact on network management, and competitive compensation.
- High salary range ($155,000 - $190,000) for experienced developers.
- Involvement in recognized and impactful technology.
- Strong culture and flexibility for work-life balance.
Pros
- Recognized company with significant opportunities for impact.
- Competitive salary range clearly outlined.
- Remote work flexibility enhancing work-life balance.
Cons
- Requires substantial experience which may limit some applicants.
- Potentially high stakes with significant responsibility toward scaling.
- Complex projects may lead to demanding work periods.
Who it's for
Senior • Remote or flexible
Good fit
- Senior backend engineers with experience in large-scale systems.
- Professionals interested in network operations innovations.
- Candidates looking for high responsibility and recognition.
Not recommended for
- Junior candidates without relevant experience.
- Individuals preferring a less technical, straightforward role.
- Those who are not interested in network management technology.
Motivation fit
Key skills
About the job
Forward Networks is revolutionizing the way large networks are managed. The Forward Enterprise platform delivers a vendor-agnostic "digital twin" of the network, based on a mathematical model. The platform scales to support hundreds of thousands of network devices, whether cloud, hybrid cloud, or on-prem. It serves as a single source of truth for the network, enabling network operators to instantly verify security posture, accelerate troubleshooting, avoid outages, and modernize network management.
Over the past few years, Forward Networks has received tremendous industry recognition, including “Cool Vendor in Enterprise Networking” by Gartner, “Product of the Year” by Cloud Computing, “Hot Company” by Cyber Defense Magazine, “Enterprise Cloud Computing Software of the Year,” and has been named to Fortune’s “Best Workplaces in the Bay Area” list.
The company was founded by four Stanford PhD graduates who saw a massive opportunity to improve network operations. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, MSD Capital, Threshold Ventures, and Goldman Sachs.
Forward Networks is currently seeking a Senior Backend Software Engineer to work as part of our Scaling team. The work will involve helping develop our product core by writing clean and solid code that interacts with our other services and components. Responsibilities include:
- Building a pipeline to ingest data from network devices, analyzing the data, and building a model of network behavior
- Scaling our computation by making the models more efficient
- Developing new product features that leverage the network model to answer user queries
Read our blog to know more about the type of work we are doing: https://forwardnetworks.com/scaling/
Requirements:
- BS in Computer Science or related degree; MS preferred
- Strong object-oriented design and development skills
- Previous experience working on large scale distributed systems
- Proficient with algorithms and design for performance and scalability
- 3+ years of full lifecycle software development experience
- 3+ years of backend experience with Java, C++ or similar systems languages
Nice to Haves:
- Database experience
- Experience with REST APIs, as well as with frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate
NOTE: experience in the networking domain is NOT a requirement for this role but is a plus.
The base pay range for this role is between $155,000 and $190,000. Base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location
