Distinguished Engineer

Freshworks; Chennai; On-site; INR 3,000,000 - 5,000,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Diversity and Equal Opportunity

Create a vibrant work environment

Professional growth opportunities

Job summary

A leading software company is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to lead its application modernization initiative. This role involves defining long-term technical roadmaps and architectural guidelines. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in software engineering, especially in modernizing large-scale applications, and will excel in mentoring engineering teams to enhance their capabilities. A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science is preferred.

Qualifications

• 18-20 years of software engineering experience, with at least 6 years in principal/staff/distinguished roles.
• Proven experience in modernizing large monolithic applications.
• Deep expertise in designing and building distributed systems.

Responsibilities

• Develop and own the long-term technical roadmap.
• Define architectural guidelines for the organization.
• Mentor technical staff and influence engineering capabilities.

Skills

Domain-Driven Design (DDD)

Expert-level proficiency in OO programming languages

Experience with cloud platforms

Microservices & API Design

Exceptional communication skills

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Azure

Job description

Overview

Work Location: Chennai / Bengaluru / Hyderabad

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 customer experience suite of products 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 in customer experience domain.
• 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

Additional Information

At Freshworks, we are creating a global workplace that enables everyone to find their true potential, purpose, and passion irrespective of their background, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. We are committed to providing equal opportunity for all and believe that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant, richer work environment that advances the goals of our employees, communities and the business.

Seniority level: Executive

Employment type: Full-time

Job function: Other

Industries: IT Services and IT Consulting