Senior Systems Engineer

Staff Engineer - Systems

Company Description

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.

Job Description

As a Staff Engineer - Systems (IC4) at Freshworks, you will focus on building and architecting next-generation platform services operating at internet scale. You will have the opportunity to redefine customer experiences by engineering distributed systems that are millisecond-efficient, always available, and highly resilient. This role sits within our core Engineering Platforms team, serving as the foundational ecosystem that enables developers, partners, and internal product teams to customize, integrate, and automate workflows seamlessly across 140 countries.

Impact You Can Create

• Redefine Internet-Scale Architecture: Build systems designed to handle massive scale safely, processing over 20TB of logs/day, 1B messages, 5B conversations, and 5M database reads/minute.

• Drive Platform Agility: Architect foundational, reusable services (including SSO, containerization, and reliable agile deployments) that bring efficiency to our 10+ core SaaS product offerings.

• Elevate Engineering Standards: Continually raise the bar for engineering excellence across the organization by optimizing performance, usability, scalability, and continuous deployment pipelines.

• Act as a High-Performance Leader: Lead by example as a hands-on technical authority, mentoring multi-functional engineers to solve complex big data and relevance engineering problems.

Roles & Responsibilities

• End-to-End System Design: Design, architect, and implement robust multi-tier software applications spanning database, backend services, and web layers.

• Pragmatic Code Execution: Spend a significant portion of your time developing clean, optimized code with limited abstraction, ensuring maximum processing efficiency.

• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate closely within agile loops alongside engineers, architects, product managers, UI/UX designers, QA, and operations teams to meet strict business requirements.

• Adoption & Integration Leadership: Build innovative platform features from scratch and liaise with external product teams to drive seamless cross-platform adoption.

• Root-Cause Troubleshooting: Debug and resolve complex, low-latency system bottlenecks within a fast-paced SaaS production environment running an assertive deployment schedule.

• Security & Governance Alignment: Implement, support, and enforce compliance with Freshworks' internal information security and compliance frameworks across your team.

Qualifications

Skills

• Distributed Systems & Big Data: Advanced mastery of distributed systems principles, cloud limits, API design, and highly scalable multi-tenant platforms.

• Backend Stack Expertise: Expert-level command over Java, the Spring framework, and Linux environments.

• Computer Science Foundations: Elite problem-solving capabilities anchored by deep expertise in data structures, algorithms, and time/space complexity analysis.

• Object-Oriented Design: Expert application of advanced OOPS concepts to build maintainable, extensible, and clean codebases.

• Technology Trend Scouting: A strong analytical mind capable of identifying emerging technology trends and open-source projects that can be strategically integrated into our stack.

• Clear Articulation: Strong oral and written communication skills with a natural capacity to translate complex platform design concepts to diverse stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Professional Timeline: 9+ years of progressive software engineering experience with a heavy emphasis on core systems and backend platforms.

• Architecture Ownership: A proven track record of holding end-to-end architecture ownership for small to medium-sized products or platform modules in production.

• SaaS Environment Tenure: Demonstrated success navigating high-velocity SaaS deployment environments, troubleshooting production systems, and maintaining high availability infrastructure.

• Education Baseline: Sound academic foundation with a Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative technical discipline.

Additional Information

At Freshworks, we have fostered an environment that enables everyone to find their true potential, purpose, and passion, welcoming colleagues of all backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and ethnicities. We are committed to providing equal opportunity and believe that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant, richer environment that boosts the goals of our employees, communities, and business. Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.

Experience Level

Senior Level