{"id":1144960,"url":"https://alion.io/job/freshworks-senior-staff-engineer-systems-3","title":"Senior Staff Engineer - Systems","company":{"id":788,"name":"Freshworks","domain":"freshworks.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/freshworks","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"SmartRecruiters","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":6,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":1,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":30,"computed_at":"2026-09-24T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Hyderabad, India"],"countries":["IN"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":40000,"max_usd":85000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":8},"experience_years_min":14,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":true},{"name":"Amazon Kinesis","optional":true},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"ClickHouse","optional":true},{"name":"Databricks","optional":true},{"name":"Delta Lake","optional":true},{"name":"FinOps","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":true},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true},{"name":"Snowflake","optional":true}],"status":"closed","first_seen_at":"2026-09-23T09:39:40Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-23","last_verified_at":"2026-09-24T08:00:03Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":"2026-09-24T08:00:03Z","days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"About Freshworks:\nOrganizations 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.\nThere’s another option. Freshworks. With a fresh vision for how the world works.\nFreshworks 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.\nFresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.\n Role Overview\nWe 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.\nThe 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.\nKey Responsibilities\nArchitecture & Strategy\nDefine and own the platform architecture roadmap for your domain, including the target state and a realistic path to it.\n\nDesign scalable, secure, and cost-efficient architectures supporting high-throughput, low-latency, multi-tenant workloads.\n\nEstablish architecture standards, design principles, decision records, and review practices.\n\nEvaluate emerging technologies and own build-versus-buy decisions with measurable outcomes.\n\nPlatform Engineering\nArchitect and build cloud-native services and APIs that scale with global growth.\n\nDesign service decomposition, API contracts, messaging and event-driven flows, caching strategies, and database-layer design.\n\nTreat multi-tenancy as a first-class design concern: isolation models, noisy-neighbour control, per-tenant limits, and cost attribution.\n\nLead platform modernization - monolith decomposition, migrations, and deprecations carried through to completion.\n\nReliability, Performance & Operations\nDrive platform reliability, availability, performance optimization, and observability.\n\nTake ownership of complex production issues in distributed SaaS environments, leading deep root-cause analysis and implementing permanent preventive safeguards.\n\nDefine SLOs, failure modes, resilience patterns, and capacity planning for the systems you own.\n\nEngineering Excellence & Quality\nWrite clean, maintainable, high-performance production code and build proof-of-concepts that settle architectural questions.\n\nEstablish rigorous engineering standards through code reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD integration.\n\nIdentify architectural bottlenecks and technical debt, and drive practical, iterative refactoring without compromising business delivery.\n\nSecurity, Privacy & Compliance\nEnsure platform designs and team practices align with information security standards and regulatory requirements.\n\nDesign for tenant isolation, access control, auditability, and data residency from the outset.\n\nTechnical Leadership\nProvide architectural guidance across multiple engineering teams.\n\nLead architecture reviews, design discussions, and technical decision-making.\n\nMentor senior and staff engineers, raising the bar through reference implementations and sponsorship rather than authority.\n\nInfluence engineering strategy and long-term technology investments; articulate complex trade-offs to both technical panels and executive stakeholders.\n\n Required Qualifications\nBachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline - or equivalent practical experience.\n\n14+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, or systems architecture within modern distributed SaaS environments.\n\nExpert-level backend engineering in Java, Python, Go, or equivalent - currently hands-on.\n\nProven experience designing and operating enterprise-scale, multi-tenant SaaS platforms, with real numbers for throughput, latency, availability, and behaviour under failure.\n\nStrong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency and idempotency, retries and backpressure, concurrency, caching, and database design and optimization.\n\nDemonstrated ownership of large-scale migrations or modernization initiatives with measurable outcomes.\n\nAdvanced production debugging skills - Linux internals, profiling, log analysis, and telemetry in distributed cloud environments.\n\nExperience leading cross-functional architecture initiatives in SaaS or product organizations.\n\nGood to Have\nData Platform & Analytics\nBatch and real-time data ingestion, transformation, and serving architectures; streaming and CDC (Kafka, Kinesis, Debezium).\n\nLakehouse and modern data platform technologies such as Delta Lake, Iceberg, Databricks, Snowflake, and cloud-native data services.\n\nReusable data models, semantic layers, and curated data products enabling self-service analytics.\n\nData governance practice - metadata management, cataloging, lineage, and data quality frameworks.\n\nFeature and training data architectures supporting AI/ML initiatives.\n\nAdjacent Experience\nClickHouse, OpenSearch, or similar analytical and search engines.\n\nAI-native product capabilities - RAG, agentic workflows, and LLM integration in production.\n\nFinOps practice: cost attribution, showback, and efficiency guardrails at platform scale.\n\n 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6665,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":14,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"All levels","optional":false}]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"India","iso":"IN","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Information Technology","Cloud Computing"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-23T14:31:39Z"},{"event":"close","at":"2026-09-24T08:00:03Z"}],"liveness":null,"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/freshworks-senior-staff-engineer-systems-3","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/freshworks-senior-staff-engineer-systems-3.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-24T21:14:37Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers"}}