Principal Engineer - Systems

Freshworks · Hyderabad, , India

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • Posted 2026-09-23
  • Confirmed live on 25 September 2026

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Job description

Job Description
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

• 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.

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 s

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