Principal Engineer Systems

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.

Key Responsibilities

Architecture & Strategy

• 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.

Platform Engineering

• 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.

Reliability Performance & Operations

• 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.

Engineering Excellence & Quality

• 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.

Security Privacy & Compliance

• Ensure platform designs and team practices align with information security standards and regulatory requirements.

• Design for tenant isolation access control auditability and data residency from the outset.

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.

Qualifications :

Required Qualifications

• Bachelors or Masters 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.

Good to Have

Data Platform & Analytics

• 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.

Adjacent Experience

• 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.

Additional Information :

At Freshworks we have fostered an environment that enables everyone to find their true potential purpose and passion welcoming colleagues of all backgrounds genders sexual orientations religions and ethnicities. We are committed to providing equal opportunity and believe that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant richer environment that boosts the goals of our employees communities and business. Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.

Remote Work :

No

Employment Type :

Full-time