Principal Engineer - Systems
Freshworks4 hours ago
Hyderābād, IndiaStaff+
Responsibilities
- Own the platform architecture roadmap, target state, architecture standards, design principles, and build-versus-buy decisions for a major domain.
- Architect and build scalable cloud-native services and APIs, including service decomposition, API contracts, messaging, event flows, caching, database design, and multi-tenant isolation.
- Lead platform modernization initiatives such as monolith decomposition, migrations, and deprecations through completion.
- Drive reliability, availability, performance, observability, SLOs, resilience patterns, failure-mode analysis, and capacity planning.
- Resolve complex distributed production issues through deep debugging and root-cause analysis, implementing permanent safeguards.
- Write maintainable, high-performance production code and proof-of-concepts while establishing engineering standards through reviews and automated testing.
- Ensure platform designs address security, privacy, access control, auditability, compliance, and data residency.
- Guide architecture reviews and technical decisions across multiple engineering teams, mentor senior and staff engineers, and influence engineering strategy.
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 in modern distributed SaaS environments.
- Expert-level hands-on backend engineering experience with Java, Python, Go, or an equivalent technology.
- Proven experience designing and operating enterprise-scale multi-tenant SaaS platforms with measurable throughput, latency, availability, and failure-behavior outcomes.
- Strong knowledge of distributed systems, including consistency, idempotency, retries, backpressure, concurrency, caching, and database optimization.
- Experience leading large-scale migrations or modernization initiatives with measurable results.
- 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 includes Kafka, Kinesis, Debezium, Delta Lake, Iceberg, Databricks, Snowflake, cloud-native data services, 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.