Principal Engineer - Systems
Freshworks2 months ago
Hyderābād, IndiaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Own the platform architecture roadmap, target state, architecture standards, design reviews, and build-versus-buy decisions for a major platform domain.
- Architect and build scalable cloud-native services and APIs, including service decomposition, API contracts, messaging, event-driven flows, caching, databases, and multi-tenant controls.
- Lead platform modernization initiatives such as monolith decomposition, migrations, and deprecations through completion.
- Drive platform reliability, availability, performance optimization, observability, SLOs, resilience patterns, failure-mode analysis, and capacity planning.
- Own complex production issues, lead root-cause analysis, and implement permanent preventive safeguards in distributed SaaS environments.
- Write and review high-performance production code, develop proof-of-concepts, and establish engineering standards through code reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD integration.
- Ensure platform designs address security standards, regulatory requirements, tenant isolation, access control, auditability, privacy, and data residency.
- Provide architectural guidance across multiple engineering teams, lead technical decision-making, mentor senior and staff engineers, and influence engineering strategy and technology investments.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
- 14+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, or systems architecture within modern distributed SaaS environments.
- Expert-level, hands-on backend engineering experience with Java, Python, Go, or equivalent.
- Experience designing and operating enterprise-scale, multi-tenant SaaS platforms with measurable throughput, latency, availability, and failure behavior.
- Strong knowledge of distributed systems, including consistency, idempotency, retries, backpressure, concurrency, caching, and database design and optimization.
- Demonstrated ownership of large-scale migrations or modernization initiatives with measurable outcomes.
- Advanced production debugging skills involving Linux internals, profiling, log analysis, and telemetry in distributed cloud environments.
- Experience leading cross-functional architecture initiatives in SaaS or product organizations.
- Preferred experience with batch and real-time data ingestion, transformation, serving architectures, streaming, CDC, lakehouse technologies, data governance, and AI/ML data architectures.
- Preferred experience with Kafka, Kinesis, Debezium, Delta Lake, Iceberg, Databricks, Snowflake, ClickHouse, OpenSearch, RAG, agentic workflows, LLM integration, and FinOps practices.
About Freshworks
Freshworks builds cloud-based customer and employee service software for IT, support, and business teams, including Freshdesk, Freshservice, and AI assistants (Freddy). It sells via subscription to organizations from SMBs to enterprises; notable customers include Sony Music Entertainment, New Balance, and Seagate. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks is publicly traded on Nasdaq under the ticker FRSH.