# Principal Engineer - Systems

**Company**: Freshworks
**Location**: Hyderabad
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/Freshworks/744000151400943-principal-engineer-systems?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_5e451ea1-406

## Description

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.

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.

## Skills

### Required
- Java
- Python
- Go
- distributed systems
- multi-tenant SaaS architecture
- microservices
- event-driven design
- large-scale production operations

### Nice to have
- Data Platform & Analytics
- Lakehouse and modern data platform technologies
- Reusable data models
- semantic layers
- curated data products
- Data governance practice
- Feature and training data architectures
- ClickHouse
- OpenSearch
- AI-native product capabilities

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