Freshworks makes it fast and easy for businesses to delight their customers and employees. We do this by taking a fresh approach to building and delivering software that is affordable, quick to implement, and designed for the end user. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Freshworks has a global team operating from 13 global locations to serve more than 65,000 companies -- from startups to public companies – that rely on Freshworks software-as-a-service to enable a better customer experience (CRM, CX) and employee experience (ITSM). 

Freshworks’ cloud-based software suite includes Freshdesk (omni-channel customer support), Freshsales (sales automation), Freshmarketer (marketing automation), Freshservice (IT service desk), Freshchat (AI-powered bots), supported by Neo, our underlying platform of shared services.

Freshworks is featured in global national press including CNBC, Forbes, Fortune, Bloomberg and has been a BuiltIn Best Place to work in San Francisco and Denver for the last 3 years. Our customer ratings have earned Freshworks products TrustRadius Top Rated Software ratings and G2 Best of Awards for Best Feature Set, Best Value for the Price and Best Relationship. 

About the Role

The Cloud Engineering Team is looking for a Principal Engineer - Systems who can execute our technology vision with our business asks.  You will work with an energetic and talented team of engineers to own and iteratively build one or more of our cloud engineering, while partnering with architects and reliability engineers from across our company who will directly consume your work.

As a Principal Engineer - Systems, you will bring your strong background in building scalable, reliable, well-monitored distributed systems and mentor your team to achieve the technology vision for your platform services. This will include opportunities to redefine customer experiences by building systems that are milli-second efficient, always available and working at internet scale. 

All our Systems Engineers wield end-to-end ownership of their systems – from design, through development, testing, deployment, all the way to managing them in production. Our System Engineers solve complex infrastructural problems as PaaS offerings, built to seamlessly scale for 10x growth. As a Principal Engineer, you always have an eye on the future, while firmly grounding yourself in the reality of today, and you guide your team bridging both. The future includes not only adding new technologies and achieving ever higher scale, but also the overall technology vision of Freshworks related to how we build and who we build for.

Responsibilities

• Cloud Engineering teams tend to be small and self-sufficient.  You will have a large scope of responsibilities.

• Plan and execute goals, proven track record

• Establish the technology direction for the team

• Independently able to design and develop production quality scalable systems.

• Represent your team’s technology and architecture as you successfully coordinate with stakeholder teams across Freshworks.

• Mentoring other engineers in the team

  • Set the standards for coding, testing

  • Establish best practices in design and development

  • Craft the next generation of technology leaders

• Design, build and own systems end-to-end for scale and performance without accidental complexity

• Work alongside Directors and leaders to prioritize and align technology initiatives

  • Roadmap planning, scoping, phasing of iterations

  • Technology debt and upgrades

  • Engineering excellence and innovation

• Strong and flexible communication skills — document, present, and defend engineering proposals and plans not just to other architects but also to semi-technical stakeholders and leaders.

• Ensure 99.999% uptime of production systems

• Keep an eye on evolving opportunities in terms of new and related problem statements that can effectively solve for Freshworks.

• Ensure that the architecture and solutions proposed are able to reduce the order of complexity existing in the system over time

• Lead sustainable incident response, blameless postmortems, and production improvements that result in direct business opportunities

• Define and own the non-functional metrics critical to your area of ownership

• 16+ Years of experience with expert-level grasp of one or more programming languages, including Java, C, C++, NodeJS, Ruby, Python, Golang.

• Experience with container systems like Docker and orchestration systems like Kubernetes (k8s)

• Experience with GNU/Linux system or other UNIX variants

• Experience working and solving production issues, writing RCAs, and setting expectations with stakeholders

• Experience with some form of Inter-Process Communication — Unix IPC, SOAP Web Services, or microservices.

• Strong track record with handling Production workloads and troubleshooting challenging issues

• Hands-on CI/CD experience and devops practices

• Detailed infrastructure and deployment knowledge of internet serving applications.

• Experience with scale-out architectural solutions, including database sharding, leader-follower systems, eventual consistency, isolation and sandboxing.

At Freshworks, we are creating a global workplace that enables everyone to find their true potential, purpose, and passion irrespective of their background, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. We are committed to providing equal opportunity for all and believe that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant, richer work environment that advances the goals of our employees, communities and the business.