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.