Principal Engineer - Systems

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.