Distinguished Engineer

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.

Job Description

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 customer experience suite of products 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 in customer experience domain.
• 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.