Senior Staff Engineer - Systems

Overview: As a Senior Staff Engineer , you will serve as a core technical anchor, driving the architectural evolution of Freshworks' multi-tier SaaS platform.

In this role, you will: Scale Platform Capabilities: Architect and deliver resilient APIs, microservices, and web-layer platform features that support complex enterprise customer scenarios while drastically improving deployment velocity, system reliability, and low-latency performance.

Elevate Engineering Discipline: Act as a technical role model and mentor to young, ambitious engineers—fostering a culture rooted in clean coding standards, robust systems thinking, and long-term product ownership.

Bridge Business & Technology: Partner closely with cross-functional leaders across Architecture, Product Management, Design, QA, Operations, and Customer Success to turn high-level business visions into seamlessly integrated, high-performing software solutions.

Roles & Responsibilities Architecture & Roadmap Execution: Own and deliver the technical roadmap for your engineering domain; design, document, and execute scalable, cost-efficient, and low-latency platform solutions.

Hands-on Development: Write clean, maintainable, and high-performance code, building APIs and core platform features that scale seamlessly alongside Freshworks’ global growth.

System Health & Tech Debt Management: Identify critical architectural bottlenecks and technical debt; design and drive practical, iterative refactoring plans without compromising business delivery.

Operational Excellence & Production Leadership: Take ownership of complex production issues in distributed SaaS environments, driving deep-dive root-cause analyses (RCA) and implementing permanent preventive safeguards.

Quality & Process Standardization: Establish rigorous engineering standards through code reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD pipeline integration to continuously raise the quality bar.

Mentorship & Talent Development: Coach and develop engineers across functions, elevating their problem-solving capabilities, systems thinking, and operational discipline.

Security & Compliance: Ensure all platform designs and team practices strictly align with Freshworks information security standards and regulatory compliance protocols.

Qualifications Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Experience: 12 to 15 years of hands-on software engineering and systems/platform engineering experience within modern distributed SaaS environments.

Architectural Ownership: Proven track record of owning end-to-end architecture and technical strategy for large-scale products or core platform infrastructure.

Production Scale: Demonstrated history of building, shipping, and maintaining high-availability, low-latency, and high-throughput systems operating under assertive deployment schedules.

Cross-Functional Leadership: Extensive experience collaborating with and influencing multi-disciplinary teams (Product, QA, Ops, Design) to drive consensus and alignment.

Skills Core Backend Expertise: Expert-level mastery in Java (Spring/Spring Boot) or Python for high-scale backend services development.

Distributed Systems Architecture: Deep proficiency in multi-tier application architecture, microservices design, RESTful APIs, messaging queues, and database layer optimization.

CS Fundamentals: Exceptional command of data structures, algorithms, advanced Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts, and design patterns.

SaaS Troubleshooting & Linux: Advanced knowledge of Linux internals, production debugging, log analysis, and system telemetry in distributed Cloud/SaaS setups.

Engineering Quality & DevOps: Strong experience with CI/CD automation, unit/integration testing frameworks, and writing clean, maintainable code with minimal abstraction.

Soft Skills & Technical Leadership: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical trade-offs to both technical panels and executive stakeholders.