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 colle