Senior Principal 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.

As a Senior Principal Engineer for the ITOM BU, you will be the primary architect of our technical future. You will own the long-term technical strategy and architectural roadmap for our IT Operations Management suite, ensuring our products are scalable, resilient, and industry leading. This is a high-visibility, "Influence-without-Authority" role where you will act as a strategic advisor to the CTO and CPO, bridging the gap between ambitious business goals and world-class engineering execution. You will be expected to tackle the most complex, ambiguous technical challenges while elevating the technical bar across the entire organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Architectural Vision & Strategy: Define and drive the multi-year technical vision for ITOM, focusing on distributed systems, high-availability architecture, and AIOps integration.
• System Design & Scale: Architect and oversee the implementation of planet-scale services that handle billions of events, focusing on observability, incident management, and automated remediation.
• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Act as a Force Multiplier by mentoring Staff and Principal engineers, fostering a culture of "Courageous Innovation" and engineering excellence.
• Cross-BU Collaboration: Break down technical silos by partnering with architects across other Business Units to drive platform consistency and shared infrastructure initiatives.
• Operational Excellence: Set the standard for reliability, performance, and security. Drive the adoption of modern DevOps/SRE practices and ensure the ITOM suite meets the highest enterprise-grade SLAs.
• Market Intelligence Integration: Keep a pulse on emerging technologies (AI/ML, Edge Computing, Serverless) and market trends to ensure Freshworks remains a disruptive force in the ITOM space.
• Strategic Decision Making: Provide data-driven technical perspectives on "Build vs. Buy" decisions, vendor evaluations, and M&A technical due diligence.

Professional Qualifications

• Experience: 12–15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years in a Principal or Distinguished Engineer capacity at a global product company.
• Domain Expertise: Proven track record in building and scaling ITOM, ITSM, or Observability platforms in a multi-tenant SaaS environment.
• Scale: Demonstrated experience in architecting systems that handle high-velocity data ingestion and complex event processing at a massive scale.
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field from a premier institution.

Leadership Profile

• Strategic Influence: Ability to communicate complex technical roadmaps to non-technical executive stakeholders and influence the broader business strategy.
• Growth Mindset: A relentless drive for continuous improvement and a history of taking "Calculated Risks" to drive innovation.

Technical Skills

Core Engineering Mastery

• Polyglot Programming: Expert-level proficiency in multiple languages such as Java, Golang, Python, or Ruby/C++.
• Distributed Systems: Deep understanding of CAP theorem, microservices patterns, distributed caching, and consensus algorithms (e.g., Raft, Paxos).
• Data Infrastructure: Expertise in NoSQL (Cassandra, MongoDB), SQL (Postgres), and stream processing frameworks (Kafka, Flink, Spark).

Cloud & Modern Infrastructure

• Cloud Native: Mastery of AWS/Azure ecosystems, Kubernetes, and container orchestration at scale.
• AIOps & ML: Strong understanding of integrating Machine Learning models for predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and automated incident response within an ITOM context.

Operational Power Skills

• SRE & Observability: Proficiency with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, and distributed tracing.
• Security & Compliance: Deep knowledge of architecting for SOC2, GDPR, and enterprise-grade security protocols.

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.