Principal Engineer - Systems

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.

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.