Forward

Director of Engineering

Texas · Director

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 63 days ago

TypeScriptNext.jsNode.jsDistributed SystemsCode ReviewPostgreSQLDynamoDBAWSKubernetesKafkaAgentic AILeadershipCommunication

About the role

Your job is to scale the team, sharpen execution, and ensure we continue to ship quickly without compromising on the things that matter (especially when money is involved).
You'll be in architecture discussions, involved in critical code reviews, and present for the hardest technical and product decisions.
We are not looking for a pure people manager who has stepped away from the work.

Lead the organization Build, manage, and develop a high-performing team of senior engineers and engineering managers. Set a high bar for hiring, performance, and engineering quality.
Own delivery Establish the systems, rituals, and accountability needed to ship predictably and at high quality.
Set technical direction Partner with founders and senior engineers on architecture, platform investments, and key build vs. buy decisions.
Drive our agentic AI strategy Identify where AI agents meaningfully improve our product and operations-and turn those ideas into production systems.
Build and scale a high-talent team Own talent density.
Design the org, leveling, and onboarding systems that let us scale quickly without compromising quality-and address underperformance decisively.
Partner across the business Work closely with product, design, and go-to-market to decide what to build, when to ship, and how to position it.
Raise the operational bar Own reliability, security, observability, on-call, and incident response. We move money-our standards are high by default.
Run the organization on metrics Define and own the metrics that matter across product, platform, and team.
Build the dashboards and feedback loops that make performance visible-and use them to drive prioritization, accountability, and decision-making at every level.

12+ years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years leading engineers and engineering managers
Track record of scaling engineering teams at high-growth startups (ideally ~10 → 50+ engineers)
Experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated, money-moving domains
Familiarity with our ecosystem: TypeScript, Next.js, modern Node runtimes (Bun/Hono), Kafka, and AWS-based infrastructure

This listing is sourced directly from Forward's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.