Distinguished Engineer
- freshworks
- 18 - 20 years
- Chennai
- 6 months ago
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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 ProductFunctional Area / Department: Engineering - Software & QARole Category: Software DevelopmentRole: Head - EngineeringEmployement Type: Full timeContact Details:
Company: FreshworksLocation(s): Chennai+ View Contact
Keyskills: Architecture Coding GCP Strategic planning Customer experience Risk management Open source Stakeholder management SQL
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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 ...
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