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.
We are seeking a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer (Network Automation) to help drive adoption and understanding of Forward's automation capabilities across customers, partners, and the broader network engineering community.
As a Senior Network Automation TME, you will sit at the intersection of product and go-to-market execution. You will translate Forward's differentiated automation capabilities — network queries, verification-as-code, API-driven workflows, and CI/CD-style change validation — into compelling automation workflows, technical content, and field enablement that resonate with network automation practitioners and decision-makers.
This is a non-quota-carrying, highly technical, and externally visible role with meaningful influence on product direction and market positioning.
Responsibilities
- Partner with Product Management to define, validate, and shape automation-related capabilities and use cases.
- Design and evangelize customer workflows that realize the value of automation features, including NQE (Network Query Engine), APIs, and CI/CD-driven verification.
- Enhance existing product integrations and build new ones to expand automation and interoperability across the broader network and IT ecosystem.
- Build and maintain lab environments to support demos, technical validation, and automation use-case exploration.
- Develop high-quality technical collateral for internal audiences, including training materials, demo guides, and sales enablement content.
- Collaborate with Marketing to create external-facing assets such as whitepapers, solution briefs, blogs, presentations, and videos.
- Enable Sales and Solutions teams with automation-focused demos, messaging, and technical training.
- Represent Forward at customer meetings, webinars, and industry events, including networking and automation conferences and trade shows.
- Contribute thought leadership on network automation trends and Forward's role in modern NetDevOps and intent-based networking architectures.
- Gather field and market feedback to influence product roadmap and automation positioning.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of experience as a Technical Marketing Engineer, Sales Engineer, Network Engineer, or similar customer-facing technical role.
- Strong understanding of enterprise networking concepts, including routing, switching, and network change management.
- Experience with NetDevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, or infrastructure-as-code workflows applied to networking.
- Familiarity with source control (Git), API integration, and building automation against network data models.
- Hands-on experience with network automation tooling and frameworks (e.g., Ansible, Terraform, Python, REST APIs, or similar).
- Experience working with complex enterprise networks across on-prem, virtualized, and cloud environments.
- Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform and familiarity with virtualization and containerized environments.
- Proven ability to build and operate lab environments for demos and technical validation.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills, with the ability to explain complex concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Networking, or a related field.
- Ability to work effectively across Product, Sales, and Marketing teams.
Preferred Qualifications
- Working knowledge of data query and transformation languages (e.g., GraphQL, JSONPath, or a query engine such as Forward's NQE).
- Familiarity with AI/ML concepts and hands-on experience exploring AI-driven use cases in network operations or data analysis.
- Working knowledge of Linux administration.
- Familiarity with Forward or similar network visibility, verification, or analytics platforms.
- Experience presenting at conferences, webinars, or customer-facing technical events.
The base pay range for this role is between $200,000 and $230,000. Base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.