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FreshworksPrincipal Engineer - Systems
This principal engineer role guides the design and long-term evolution of the enterprise platform architecture that underpins Freshworks' multi-tier SaaS offerings. The engineer sets the architectural…
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About This Role
This principal engineer role guides the design and long-term evolution of the enterprise platform architecture that underpins Freshworks' multi-tier SaaS offerings. The engineer sets the architectural direction for a major platform area, leads modernization programs, and establishes standards for how services are built, how reliable they are, how well the code is engineered and what they cost to run. The position remains hands-on, with the engineer writing production code and…
Job Description
This principal engineer role guides the design and long-term evolution of the enterprise platform architecture that underpins Freshworks' multi-tier SaaS offerings. The engineer sets the architectural direction for a major platform area, leads modernization programs, and establishes standards for how services are built, how reliable they are, how well the code is engineered and what they cost to run. The position remains hands-on, with the engineer writing production code and taking the lead on hard debugging problems.
The principal engineer owns a multi-year architecture roadmap for the domain, including where the platform should end up and a practical route to get there. Designs must handle high volumes, low delays and many tenants on shared systems, with isolation, per-tenant quotas and cost tracking built in from the start. Responsibilities cover cloud-native services and APIs, how work is split among services, messaging and event flows, caching, and database design. The role also drives migrations away from monolithic code, supervises architecture reviews and offers guidance to several engineering groups. It sets service-level objectives and capacity plans, runs deep investigations into major outages, and makes build-or-buy choices with clear, measurable outcomes.
The candidate has fourteen or more years working in software, platform or systems architecture for contemporary distributed SaaS products, and works hands-on in Java, Python, Go or a similar language today. Experience designing and running multi-tenant SaaS platforms at enterprise scale, supported by measured throughput, latency and availability figures, is expected. A solid grasp of distributed-system basics such as consistency, retries, concurrency, caching and database tuning is needed, as is advanced skill at production debugging. Knowledge of data platforms, analytics, AI-native features and cost governance is a plus. The listing is on-site in Hyderabad, and no salary range is stated.
Responsibilities
- Shape the long-term architecture plan for your area, covering the desired end state and a workable route to it.
- Create multi-tenant workloads that handle heavy traffic with low delay while staying economical and safe.
- Create architecture standards, design principles, decision logs and review practices.
- Assess new technologies and decide what to build versus buy.
- Develop cloud-first services and interfaces that expand alongside the company's growth.
- Treat multi-tenancy as a core design concern: isolation, noisy-neighbor protection, tenant limits and cost allocation.
- Lead modernization such as breaking up monoliths and finishing migrations and deprecations.
- Drive reliability, availability, performance and observability work.
- Lead deep investigations of major production failures and install lasting safeguards.
- Define service-level objectives, failure modes, resilience approaches and capacity plans.
- Write high-quality production code and prototype to settle open architecture questions.
- Set engineering standards through reviews, test automation and CI/CD.
- Find architectural limits and technical debt, and refactor in small steps without stalling delivery.
- Make sure designs and practices meet security and regulatory requirements, including isolation, access control, audit and data residency.
- Guide several engineering teams, lead architecture reviews and mentor senior and staff engineers.
Requirements
- 14 or more years in software, platform or systems architecture for modern distributed SaaS.
- Current hands-on backend experience in Java, Python, Go or an equivalent language.
- Experience creating and running multi-tenant SaaS platforms at enterprise scale, with measured throughput, latency, uptime and failure behavior.
- Working knowledge of consistency, idempotency, retries, backpressure, concurrency, caching and database tuning.
- Track record leading large migrations or modernization efforts with quantifiable results.
- Advanced production debugging: Linux internals, profiling, logs and telemetry in distributed cloud systems.
- History of leading architecture work across several functions in SaaS or product companies.
Qualifications
- Bachelor's or master's-level technical training, or equivalent practical experience.
- Data platform experience: batch and streaming ingestion, change data capture, lakehouse tooling and data governance.
- Search and analytics engines, AI-native features such as retrieval-augmented generation and LLM integration, and FinOps practice.
Core Skills
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers are based only on the employer’s listing; where it doesn’t say, neither do we.
Where is this role based?
The listing gives Hyderabad and marks the role as on-site.
What experience is required?
The posting asks for at least fourteen years working in software, platform or systems architecture on contemporary distributed SaaS.
What degree is expected?
Either a bachelor's or master's in a technical subject is listed, or equivalent practical experience instead.
What is the salary?
The posting does not specify a salary range.
How do I apply?
The posting does not describe an application process.
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