Staff Engineer - Systems

Job description

As a Staff Software Engineer (IC4) within the Systems team, you will act as a principal technical architect and champion for our foundational infrastructure. You will be responsible for defining the technical direction of our core distributed systems, solving complex scaling paradigms, and engineering high-throughput, low-latency platforms that power our global SaaS ecosystem. You will operate as a strategic partner to engineering leadership, balancing bleeding-edge system design with long-term operational excellence. Impact You Will Create Define Foundational Architecture: Architect, pioneer, and own next-generation, multi-tenant cloud-native distributed infrastructure from zero to scale, establishing design patterns that serve as the blueprint across the entire engineering organization. Guarantee Tier-0 Production Excellence: Set the technical standard for mission-critical systems, engineering multi-region fault tolerance, advanced disaster recovery, and deep observability to guarantee 99.999% ("five nines") availability at scale. Act as a Multi-Org Force Multiplier: Guide and grow senior technical talent across multiple teams. Raise the technical bar through foundational design reviews, steering committee contributions, and cross-functional technical alignment. Pioneer AI-Driven Platform Evolution: Strategic integration and optimization of autonomous AI systems, LLM infrastructure, and next-gen AI tools to radically accelerate developer velocity and enhance platform capabilities. Roles & Responsibilities Strategic Infrastructure Lifecycle Ownership: Drive the long-term roadmap for our core systems. Own the full lifecycle of platform and infrastructure initiatives, transforming highly ambiguous business visions into concrete, scalable technical realities. High-Performance Distributed Systems Architecture: Design, build, and optimize next-generation backend services, high-throughput streaming pipelines, and robust microservices capable of handling millions of concurrent connections. System Bottleneck & Performance Engineering: Lead deep-dive architectural refactoring and performance tuning across the entire stack, optimizing kernel/OS interactions, network protocols, memory management, and database query execution paths. Global Production Governance: Champion systemic resilience by architecting advanced service meshes, rate-limiting frameworks, circuit breakers, multi-region failover protocols, and automated chaos engineering practices. Cross-Functional & Executive Alignment: Partner closely with Principal Engineers, SRE Directors, and Product Executives to translate product roadmaps into long-term infrastructure capacity and architectural readiness. Engineering Standards & Governance: Define, document, and enforce company-wide engineering standards for distributed systems, advanced design patterns, and systemic security controls. Skills & Competencies Advanced Systems Engineering: Master-level fluency in backend systems languages (e.g., Go, Java, Rust, C++), concurrent programming, asynchronous execution frameworks, and low-latency microservices design. Advanced System Design & Distributed Systems: Deep understanding of distributed systems theory (e.g., CAP theorem, consensus protocols like Raft/Paxos, replication, partitioning, and sharding). Data Infrastructure Rigor: Expert-level knowledge of data modeling, transaction isolation levels, and tuning distributed storage systems (Relational, NoSQL, NewSQL, distributed caches like Redis, and message buses like Kafka/Pulsar). AI & Next-Gen Infrastructure Fluency: Hands-on experience architecting vector databases, optimizing hardware accelerators (GPUs/TPUs), or building backend infrastructure optimized for AI model hosting and routing. Systems Telemetry & Observability: Expert capability in designing structured logging, distributed tracing, and metric aggregation models across vast distributed fleets. Influence Without Authority: Exceptional communication skills with a proven ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to non-technical executives while inspiring and aligning diverse engineering groups. Qualifications Professional Timeline: 9+ years of progressive experience in software systems engineering, with a proven track record of advancing into staff-level or principal-level architectural responsibilities within high-growth product organizations. Production Track Record: A verifiable history of designing and shipping high-scale, enterprise-grade SaaS infrastructure that handles massive transactional throughput and has successfully survived major architectural evolutionary cycles. Execution Style: A highly autonomous, strategic thinker who thrives in high-ambiguity environments, commands deep respect through technical execution, and inherently balances rapid business value delivery with reducing organizational technical debt. Education Baseline: Master’s or Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Systems Engineering, or a highly quantitative technical field. 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.