Freshworks: Principal Engineer - Systems — Hyderabad, India

About Freshworks

Freshworks develops cloud-based software for customer and employee experiences. Its product range includes customer support, sales and marketing automation, chat and IT service management. The employer names Freshdesk, Freshsales, Freshmarketer, Freshservice and Freshchat, supported by shared platform services. These applications address different operational needs, from managing customer conversations and sales activity to helping employees obtain IT services. The business emphasises software designed for end users and straightforward implementation.

The position and its setting

Freshworks lists Principal Engineer - Systems in Hyderabad, India, under reference P-1009251_1. The details below separate the work described by the employer from essential conditions, preferred experience and practical preparation advice.

• Employment type: Full-time
• Employer listing date: 23 September 2026
• Brands: Freshworks

Responsibilities and work described

• 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
• 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
• Establishment: architecture standards, design principles, decision records, and review practices
• Evaluate emerging technologies and own build-versus-buy decisions with measurable outcomes
• Platform Engineering
• Architecture: 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
• Leadership: 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

Essential requirements and candidate background

• 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
• Experience designing and operating enterprise-scale, multi-tenant SaaS platforms, with real numbers for throughput, latency, availability, and behaviour under failure
• Understanding: distributed systems fundamentals: consistency and idempotency, retries and backpressure, concurrency, caching, and database design and optimization
• Demonstrated ownership of large-scale migrations or modernization initiatives with measurable outcomes
• Advanced production debugging skills — Linux internals, profiling, log analysis, and telemetry in distributed cloud environments
• Experience leading cross-functional architecture initiatives in SaaS or product organizations

Preferred experience and additional strengths

• Data Platform & Analytics
• Batch and real-time data ingestion, transformation, and serving architectures; streaming and CDC (Kafka, Kinesis, Debezium)
• Lakehouse and modern data platform technologies such as Delta Lake, Iceberg, Databricks, Snowflake, and cloud-native data services
• Reusable data models, semantic layers, and curated data products enabling self-service analytics
• Data governance practice — metadata management, cataloging, lineage, and data quality frameworks
• Feature and training data architectures supporting AI/ML initiatives
• Adjacent Experience
• ClickHouse, OpenSearch, or similar analytical and search engines
• AI-native product capabilities — RAG, agentic workflows, and LLM integration in production
• FinOps practice: cost attribution, showback, and efficiency guardrails at platform scale

Location, schedule and contract conditions

• Work arrangement: Hybrid
• Advertised location: Hyderabad, India

Conditions requiring the complete notice

Some passages contain complex or combined conditions that have not been reduced to short eligibility statements here. Read the complete linked notice for those passages, including any alternatives, exceptions or restrictions. The concise facts above should not be treated as the full wording of every condition.

Pay and application dates

A verified salary figure is not established in this article. An online estimate for another Principal Engineer - Systems vacancy is not an offer for reference P-1009251_1; use the employer’s own pay disclosure and recruitment communication.

A closing date is not confirmed in this article. Check the current employer page before submitting: an undated posting can change or be withdrawn.

How to apply to Freshworks

Applications follow the official employer page linked below.

Open the official Freshworks posting below and match the title and reference P-1009251_1.

Compare your qualifications and experience with the essential conditions for the Hyderabad, India position, then read the preferred criteria separately.

Prepare an accurate CV and the supporting items requested in that employer’s application. Provide only information and documents you are authorised to share.

Use the employer’s application option, complete the required fields and review the submission. Retain the acknowledgement when one is provided. Job Alerts World does not receive the application.

Practical preparation: Python

Python work is easier to assess through a concrete example than a list of libraries. Explain the problem, the input data, the parts you implemented and how you checked the output. Include a repository or a short technical note when you can share it.

Relevant skills

• Python
• Java
• Kafka
• CI/CD
• APIs
• AI/ML
• LLMs
• ISO
• audit
• compliance
• investment
• stakeholder management
• root-cause analysis
• Linux
• AI