Senior Staff Engineer - Systems

Overview: 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 Qual