Your browser does not support javascript! Please enable it, otherwise web will not work for you.

Distinguished Engineer @ freshworks

Home > Software Development

 Distinguished Engineer

Job Description

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 & 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

Job Classification

Industry: Software Product
Functional Area / Department: Engineering - Software & QA
Role Category: Software Development
Role: Head - Engineering
Employement Type: Full time

Contact Details:

Company: Freshworks
Location(s): Chennai

+ View Contactajax loader


Keyskills:   Architecture Coding GCP Strategic planning Customer experience Risk management Open source Stakeholder management SQL

 Job seems aged, it may have been expired!
 Fraud Alert to job seekers!

₹ Not Disclosed

Similar positions

CTO - Quantum Engineering - Developer

  • Wipro
  • 2 - 7 years
  • Bengaluru
  • 4 days ago
₹ Not Disclosed

Data Engineer (Azure Purview)

  • Capgemini
  • 6 - 11 years
  • Hyderabad
  • 4 days ago
₹ Not Disclosed

MLOps Engineer

  • Capgemini
  • 5 - 10 years
  • Hyderabad
  • 4 days ago
₹ Not Disclosed

Custom Software Engineer

  • Accenture
  • 2 - 5 years
  • Mumbai
  • 5 days ago
₹ Not Disclosed

freshworks

Freshworks makes it fast and easy for businesses to delight their customers and employees. We do this by taking a fresh approach to building and delivering software that is affordable, quick to implement, and designed for the end-user. More than 50,000 companies -- from startups to public companies ...