Distinguished Engineer

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 At Freshworks we build uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional customer and employee experiences Our enterprise-grade solutions are powerful yet easy to use and quick to deliver results Our people-first approach to AI eliminates friction making employees more effective and organizations more productive Over 72 000 companies including Bridgestone New Balance Nucor S P Global and Sony Music trust Freshworks customer experience CX and employee experience EX software to fuel customer loyalty and service efficiency And over 4 500 Freshworks employees make this possible all around the world Fresh vision Real impact Come build it with us Work Location Chennai Bengaluru Hyderabad As a Distinguished Engineer you will be the chief architect and technical authority for our application modernization initiative You will operate with a high degree of autonomy providing the thought leadership necessary to guide our engineering organization through a multi-year transformation Your primary mission is to develop and implement a strategy that methodically transitions our monolithic application to a distributed system all while ensuring the stability of our current platform and the continuous delivery of value to our customers Key Responsibilities Strategic Planning Develop and own the long-term technical roadmap Identify opportunities to invest in platform capabilities innovation and tooling Lead platform modernization breaking the monolith developer experience improvement AI ML capability integrations Build strategies to reduce tech debt improve efficiency Architectural Leadership Define architectural guidelines best practices for the BU Organization Promote modularity reusability observability and resiliency Ensure adoption via workshops architectural reviews Serve as a decision maker and escalation point for architecture disputes Guiding strategies for multi-region deployments distributed data and async communication Embed SRE security compliance data privacy and performance thinking into architecture from the ground up Encourage adoption of latest technologies Hands-On Implementation Prototyping You are expected to be deeply technical Lead by example by prototyping new services creating boilerplate for teams to follow and tackling the most complex technical challenges yourself Technical Governance As a Distinguished Engineer you are expected to establish and uphold the technical standards practices and decision-making frameworks Define coding standards architectural patterns and technology principles Guide architecture review process ensuring alignment with company-wide standards Define policies for adoption maturity and deprecation of frameworks tools and languages Ensure key decisions are made with transparency peer input and traceability Guidance on critical tradeoffs - build vs buy open source Mentorship Influence Act as a technical mentor to senior ICs technical leaders Elevate the technical capabilities of the entire BU organization through presentations documentation and one-on-one guidance Your decisions and insights should influence and align engineers and leaders across the company Cross-Functional Collaboration Partner with product business and executive teams to translate product vision into scalable architectural solutions Identify platform level investment for product velocity Engage with Design UX and research to ensure customer experience accessibility performance and responsiveness Represent engineering in strategic customer conversations or escalations by partnering with the business stakeholders Drive collaboration across engineering functions Participate in investment prioritization and OKR reviews Risk Management Should play a critical role in identifying and mitigating technical risks that could jeopardize product s success customer experience and integrity Qualifications Qualifications Experience 18-20 years of software engineering experience with at least 6 years in a Principal Staff Distinguished level roles where you have been responsible for the technical direction of a large-scale business-critical system Proven hands-on experience leading the successful modernization of a significant monolithic application into a microservices or service-oriented architecture You must be able to speak in detail about the strategies you used the challenges you faced and the outcomes you delivered Expert-level proficiency in one or more OO programming languages such as Java Ruby on Rails etc Deep expertise in designing and building distributed systems including an understanding of the trade-offs between different architectural patterns e g REST gRPC event-driven Extensive experience with cloud platforms AWS GCP or Azure containerization Docker Kubernetes and associated infrastructure Bachelor s or Master s degree in Computer Science or equivalent and demonstrable real-world experience Key Skills Architectural Strategic Skills Domain-Driven Design DDD Strangler Fig other migration patterns Event-Driven Architecture Data decomposition strategies System performance modeling scaling Technology evaluation selection Roadmap development Technical Engineering Skills Microservices API Design REST gRPC Message Brokers Kafka RabbitMQ SQS Container Orchestration Kubernetes Databases SQL NoSQL understanding trade-offs CI CD pipelines and GitOps Observability Prometheus Grafana OpenTelemetry Secure coding practices in a distributed environment Leadership Soft Skills Exceptional communication written and verbal Ability to influence without authority Stakeholder management Mentoring and coaching senior engineers Pragmatism and business-awareness Comfort with ambiguity Additional Information 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