Senior Staff Engineer - Systems

About the role

Organizations everywhere struggle under the crushing costs and complexities of “solutions” that promise to simplify their lives. To create a better experience for their customers and employees. To help them grow. Software is a choice that can make or break a business. Create better or worse experiences. Propel or throttle growth. Business software has become a blocker instead of ways to get work done.

There’s another option. Freshworks. With a fresh vision for how the world works.

Freshworks Inc. builds uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional employee and customer experiences. Our people-first approach to AI eliminates friction, helping businesses reduce complexity, lower cost-to-serve, and deliver faster, more human support through enterprise-grade yet easy-to-use CX and IT solutions. Nearly 75,000 companies, including Bridgestone, New Balance, Nucor, S&P Global, and Sony Music, trust Freshworks to power their Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) operations.

Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.

As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will serve as a core technical anchor, driving the architectural evolution of Freshworks' multi-tier SaaS platform. In this role, you will:

• Scale Platform Capabilities: Architect and deliver resilient APIs, microservices, and web-layer platform features that support complex enterprise customer scenarios while drastically improving deployment velocity, system reliability, and low-latency performance.
• Elevate Engineering Discipline: Act as a technical role model and mentor to young, ambitious engineers—fostering a culture rooted in clean coding standards, robust systems thinking, and long-term product ownership.
• Bridge Business & Technology: Partner closely with cross-functional leaders across Architecture, Product Management, Design, QA, Operations, and Customer Success to turn high-level business visions into seamlessly integrated, high-performing software solutions.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Architecture & Roadmap Execution: Own and deliver the technical roadmap for your engineering domain; design, document, and execute scalable, cost-efficient, and low-latency platform solutions.
• Hands-on Development: Write clean, maintainable, and high-performance code, building APIs and core platform features that scale seamlessly alongside Freshworks’ global growth.
• System Health & Tech Debt Management: Identify critical architectural bottlenecks and technical debt; design and drive practical, iterative refactoring plans without compromising business delivery.
• Operational Excellence & Production Leadership: Take ownership of complex production issues in distributed SaaS environments, driving deep-dive root-cause analyses (RCA) and implementing permanent preventive safeguards.
• Quality & Process Standardization: Establish rigorous engineering standards through code reviews, automated testing, and CI/CD pipeline integration to continuously raise the quality bar.
• Mentorship & Talent Development: Coach and develop engineers across functions, elevating their problem-solving capabilities, systems thinking, and operational discipline.
• Security & Compliance: Ensure all platform designs and team practices strictly align with Freshworks information security standards and regulatory compliance protocols.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience: 12 to 15 years of hands-on software engineering and systems/platform engineering experience within modern distributed SaaS environments.
• Architectural Ownership: Proven track record of owning end-to-end architecture and technical strategy for large-scale products or core platform infrastructure.
• Production Scale: Demonstrated history of building, shipping, and maintaining high-availability, low-latency, and high-throughput systems operating under assertive deployment schedules.
• Cross-Functional Leadership: Extensive experience collaborating with and influencing multi-disciplinary teams (Product, QA, Ops, Design) to drive consensus and alignment.

Skills

• Core Backend Expertise: Expert-level mastery in Java (Spring/Spring Boot) or Python for high-scale backend services development.
• Distributed Systems Architecture: Deep proficiency in multi-tier application architecture, microservices design, RESTful APIs, messaging queues, and database layer optimization.
• CS Fundamentals: Exceptional command of data structures, algorithms, advanced Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) concepts, and design patterns.
• SaaS Troubleshooting & Linux: Advanced knowledge of Linux internals, production debugging, log analysis, and system telemetry in distributed Cloud/SaaS setups.
• Engineering Quality & DevOps: Strong experience with CI/CD automation, unit/integration testing frameworks, and writing clean, maintainable code with minimal abstraction.
• Soft Skills & Technical Leadership: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical trade-offs to both technical panels and executive stakeholders.