Principal Engineer - Systems

Role Overview 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. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise in distributed systems, multi-tenant SaaS architecture, microservices, event-driven design, and large-scale production operations with strong leadership and stakeholder management capabilities — and remains genuinely hands-on, writing production code and leading deep debugging when it matters. Key Responsibilities 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. Establish architecture standards, design principles, decision records, and review practices. Evaluate emerging technologies and own build-versus-buy decisions with measurable outcomes. Platform Engineering Architect 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. Lead 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