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Freshworks is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the design and evolution of enterprise-scale platform architecture across their multi-tier SaaS products. This is a hands-on technical leadership role combining deep systems expertise with strategic influence across the organization.
You will own the platform architecture roadmap for a major domain, defining target state and realistic modernization paths. Key responsibilities include:
**Architecture & Strategy**: Define platform architecture standards and design principles; evaluate emerging technologies; own build-versus-buy decisions with measurable outcomes; establish architecture review practices and decision records.
**Platform Engineering**: Architect cloud-native, scalable services and APIs supporting high-throughput, low-latency, multi-tenant workloads. Design service decomposition, API contracts, event-driven flows, caching strategies, and database-layer design. Treat multi-tenancy as a first-class concern with isolation models, noisy-neighbor control, and cost attribution. Lead platform modernization initiatives including monolith decomposition, migrations, and deprecations through to completion.
**Reliability & Operations**: Drive platform reliability, availability, and performance optimization. Own complex production issues in distributed SaaS environments, leading root-cause analysis and implementing preventive safeguards. Define SLOs, failure modes, resilience patterns, and capacity planning.
**Engineering Excellence**: Write clean, maintainable, high-performance production code and build proof-of-concepts. Establish rigorous engineering standards through code reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD. Identify and drive practical refactoring of architectural bottlenecks and technical debt.
**Security & Compliance**: Ensure platform designs align with information security standards and regulatory requirements. Design for tenant isolation, access control, auditability, and data residency.
**Technical Leadership**: Provide architectural guidance across multiple engineering teams. Lead architecture reviews and design discussions. Mentor senior and staff engineers through reference implementations and sponsorship. Influence engineering strategy and articulate complex trade-offs to technical and executive stakeholders.
**Requirements**
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or related discipline (or equivalent practical experience)
- 14+ years of software engineering, platform engineering, or systems architecture experience in 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 demonstrated throughput, latency, availability, and failure-mode metrics
- Strong understanding of distributed systems fundamentals: consistency and idempotency, retries and backpressure, concurrency, caching, 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, telemetry in distributed cloud environments
- Experience leading cross-functional architecture initiatives in SaaS or product organizations
**Nice to Have**
- Data platform & analytics: batch/real-time data ingestion, streaming (Kafka, Kinesis, Debezium), lakehouse technologies (Delta Lake, Iceberg, Databricks, Snowflake)
- Data governance: metadata management, cataloging, lineage, data quality frameworks
- ClickHouse, OpenSearch, or similar analytical/search engines
- AI-native product capabilities: RAG, agentic workflows, LLM integration in production
- FinOps practice: cost attribution, showback, efficiency guardrails at platform scale
