Principal Engineer - Systems

About Freshworks

Organizations everywhere struggle under the crushing costs and complexities of “solutions” that promise to simplify their lives. To create a better experience for their customers and employees. To help them grow. Software is a choice that can make or break a business. Create better or worse experiences. Propel or throttle growth. Business software has become a blocker instead of ways to get work done.

There’s another option. Freshworks. With a fresh vision for how the world works.

Freshworks Inc. builds uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional employee and customer experiences. Our people-first approach to AI eliminates friction, helping businesses reduce complexity, lower cost-to-serve, and deliver faster, more human support through enterprise-grade yet easy-to-use CX and IT solutions. Nearly 75,000 companies, including Bridgestone, New Balance, Nucor, S&P Global, and Sony Music, trust Freshworks to power their Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) operations.

Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.

Role Overview

We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Engineer to lead the design and evolution of the enterprise-scale platform architecture that powers Freshworks’ multi-tier SaaS products. This role will define the architecture strategy for a major platform domain, drive modernization initiatives, and establish best practices across service design, reliability, engineering quality, and cost.

The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise in distributed systems, multi-tenant SaaS architecture, microservices, event-driven design, and large-scale production operations with strong leadership and stakeholder management capabilities — and remains genuinely hands-on, writing production code and leading deep debugging when it matters.

Technical Leadership

- Provide architectural guidance across multiple engineering teams.
- Lead architecture reviews, design discussions, and technical decision-making.
- Mentor senior and staff engineers, raising the bar through reference implementations and sponsorship rather than authority.
- Influence engineering strategy and long-term technology investments; articulate complex trade-offs to both technical panels and executive stakeholders.

Responsibilities

Define and own the platform architecture roadmap for your domain, including the target state and a realistic path to it.; Design scalable, secure, and cost-efficient architectures supporting high-throughput, low-latency, multi-tenant workloads.; Establish architecture standards, design principles, decision records, and review practices.; Evaluate emerging technologies and own build-versus-buy decisions with measurable outcomes.; Architect and build cloud-native services and APIs that scale with global growth.; Design service decomposition, API contracts, messaging and event-driven flows, caching strategies, and database-layer design.; Treat multi-tenancy as a first-class design concern: isolation models, noisy-neighbour control, per-tenant limits, and cost attribution.; Lead platform modernization — monolith decomposition, migrations, and deprecations carried through to completion.; Drive platform reliability, availability, performance optimization, and observability.; Take ownership of complex production issues in distributed SaaS environments, leading deep root-cause analysis and implementing permanent preventive safeguards.; Define SLOs, failure modes, resilience patterns, and capacity planning for the systems you own.; Write clean, maintainable, high-performance production code and build proof-of-concepts that settle architectural questions.; Establish rigorous engineering standards through code reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD integration.; Identify architectural bottlenecks and technical debt, and drive practical, iterative refactoring without compromising business delivery.

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 backend engineering in Java, Python, Go, or equivalent — currently hands-on.; Proven experience designing and operating enterprise-scale, multi-tenant SaaS platforms, with real numbers for throughput, latency, availability, and behaviour under failure.; Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency and idempotency, retries and backpressure, concurrency, caching, and database design and optimization.; Demonstrated ownership of large-scale migrations or modernization initiatives with measurable outcomes.; Advanced production debugging skills — Linux internals, profiling, log analysis, and telemetry in distributed cloud environments.; Experience leading cross-functional architecture initiatives in SaaS or product organizations.

Nice to have

Batch and real-time data ingestion, transformation, and serving architectures, streaming and CDC (Kafka, Kinesis, Debezium).; Lakehouse and modern data platform technologies such as Delta Lake, Iceberg, Databricks, Snowflake, and cloud-native data services.; Reusable data models, semantic layers, and curated data products enabling self-service analytics.; Data governance practice — metadata management, cataloging, lineage, and data quality frameworks.; Feature and training data architectures supporting AI/ML initiatives.; ClickHouse, OpenSearch, or similar analytical and search engines.; AI-native product capabilities — RAG, agentic workflows, and LLM integration in production.; FinOps practice: cost attribution, showback, and efficiency guardrails at platform scale.