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. Required Qualifications • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related discipline — or equivalent practical experience. • 14+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, or systems architecture within 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 real numbers for throughput, latency, availability, and