Lead Software Engineer - IOS

Freshworks; Chennai District; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Freshworks is seeking a Lead iOS Engineer to own the technical direction of flagship mobile apps across platforms. You will set architecture, decide on native Swift vs cross‑platform options, and be accountable for performance, release health, and code quality.

You will mentor engineers and partner with product, design, backend, and QA leadership to shape roadmaps. You will stay hands-on, writing critical code, driving large-scale refactors, and leading incident response while ensuring robust

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 6+ years building and shipping production iOS applications.
• 2+ years in a technical leadership role — owning architecture and outcomes for a team of engineers.
• Expert-level Swift with strong Objective-C interop; deep command of the iOS SDK and Xcode.
• Experience with modular mobile architectures and dependency management (SPM/CocoaPods).
• Deep knowledge of concurrency and multithreading (GCD, Swift Concurrency, actors).
• Strong UIKit and SwiftUI experience with reactive patterns (Combine).
• Experience with cross-platform delivery (Flutter or React Native) and when to use it.
• Data persistence including Core Data/SQLite/Realm with migrations.
• Ownership of mobile CI/CD end-to-end (Fastlane, GitHub Actions).
• Track record of measurable improvements in performance, stability, or velocity.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the mobile architecture across the app portfolio, including modularization and offline/sync strategy.
• Decide on native Swift vs Flutter/React Native while documenting trade-offs and migration paths.
• Lead design reviews, drive SOLID standards, and maintain pattern consistency (MVVM, VIPER, Coordinator).
• Manage large-scale refactors and platform migrations with low-risk rollout plans.
• Mentor engineers and drive hiring for mobile; influence cross-functional decisions.
• Break down initiatives into scoped work and stay hands-on with high-risk components and performance paths.
• Own the release train and CI/CD workflows including App Store submission and rollbacks.
• Define observability and quality gates; lead incident response and post-mortems.

Skills

8+ years experience

6+ years leadership

Swift

Objective-C interop

iOS SDK

Xcode

SwiftUI

UIKit

Flutter (Dart) / React Native

Core Data

Concurrency (GCD, Swift Concurrency)

OOP & SOLID

MVVM / VIPER / Coordinator

RESTful & GraphQL

CI/CD (Fastlane, GitHub Actions)

Code signing & App Store Connect

Design docs & RFCs

Mentoring engineers

Agile & SDLC

Security & data privacy

Tools

Xcode

Instruments

Fastlane

GitHub Actions

CocoaPods

SPM

App Store Connect

GraphQL client

Shared SDKs / libraries

Job description

As a Lead iOS Engineer at Freshworks, you own the technical direction of one or more flagship mobile applications serving millions of users. You set the architectural standard, make the build-vs-buy and native-vs-cross-platform calls, and are accountable for the quality, performance, and release health of your surface area. You lead a team of iOS and cross-platform engineers — through design reviews, mentorship, and hands‑on pairing rather than through hierarchy — and you partner directly with Product, Design, Backend, and QA leadership to shape the roadmap, not just execute it. You remain a hands‑on engineer: you write code in the hardest parts of the system, and your judgement is the escalation point when the team is stuck.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve the mobile architecture across the app portfolio — modularization, dependency boundaries, state management, navigation, and offline/sync strategy.
• Make and document consequential technical decisions (native Swift vs Flutter/React Native, third-party SDK adoption, persistence and caching strategy) with clear trade‑off analysis and a migration path.
• Author and drive technical design documents; run design reviews and hold the bar on SOLID, clean architecture, and pattern consistency (MVVM, VIPER, Coordinator, unidirectional data flow).
• Lead large‑scale refactors and platform migrations (e.g. UIKit → SwiftUI, monolith → modular packages) with incremental, low‑risk rollout plans.
• Identify and remove systemic technical debt; maintain a prioritized architecture backlog reviewed with Product and Engineering Management.

Delivery & execution

• Break down ambiguous, multi‑quarter product initiatives into scoped, sequenced, estimable work for the team.
• Stay hands‑on: personally deliver the highest‑risk components, prototypes, and performance‑critical paths.
• Own the release train — versioning, release branching, phased rollouts, App Store submission and review escalations, kill switches, and rollback procedures.
• Own build and developer productivity: build times, flaky test elimination, local dev setup, and CI/CD reliability (Fastlane, GitHub Actions).
• Drive integration contracts with backend teams for RESTful and GraphQL APIs, including versioning, backward compatibility, and error‑handling standards.

Quality, performance & reliability

• Define and enforce the quality bar: test strategy across unit, integration, snapshot, and UI layers; code coverage expectations; and mandatory quality gates in CI.
• Own crash‑free‑session rate, ANR/hang rate, cold‑start and frame‑rate budgets, app size, and battery/network efficiency for your surface area; set targets and report against them.
• Instrument and profile with Instruments, MetricKit, and Xcode Organizer; lead performance investigations that cross app, SDK, and backend boundaries.
• Act as incident commander for production mobile incidents — triage, mitigate, communicate, and run blameless post‑mortems with tracked action items.
• Define observability standards: crash reporting, structured logging, analytics events, feature flags, and remote config (Crashlytics/Sentry, Firebase Remote Config).

People & influence

• Mentor senior, mid‑level, and junior engineers; grow at least one engineer to the next level through structured feedback and stretch ownership.
• Own code review culture — set expectations for review depth and turnaround, and coach through reviews rather than gatekeeping.
• Drive the hiring bar for mobile: design and calibrate interview loops, conduct architecture and coding interviews, and support onboarding.
• Provide input to Engineering Managers on performance, growth, and team composition.
• Represent mobile engineering in cross‑functional and cross‑org forums; influence platform, design‑system, and API decisions made outside your team.
• Write and evangelise internal standards, playbooks, and documentation; run knowledge‑sharing sessions and guild forums.

Product & business partnership

• Partner with Product to shape scope and sequencing — surface technical constraints early and propose cheaper paths to the same outcome.
• Define success metrics with Product (adoption, engagement, crash rate, task completion) and drive iteration based on data.
• Assess feasibility and effort for new initiatives; provide credible estimates with explicit assumptions and risks.
• Implement and support compliance of self and team to Freshworks compliance and information security processes, including secure‑coding practices, data‑handling requirements, and privacy/App Store policy obligations.

Requirements / Must Have:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 6+ years building and shipping production iOS applications.
• 2+ years in a technical leadership role — tech lead, lead engineer, or equivalent — owning architecture and outcomes for a team of engineers.
• Expert‑level Swift with strong Objective‑C interop; deep command of the iOS SDK, Xcode, Instruments, and the full debugging toolchain.
• Demonstrated ownership of a non‑trivial mobile architecture at scale, including modularization and dependency management (SPM/CocoaPods).
• Deep expertise in concurrency and multithreading (GCD, Swift Concurrency / async‑await, actors), memory management, and race/deadlock diagnosis.
• Strong experience with UIKit and SwiftUI, plus reactive/asynchronous patterns (Combine or equivalent).
• Proven experience with cross‑platform delivery — Flutter (Dart) or React Native — and the judgement to know when not to use it.
• Data persistence and offline‑first design (Core Data, SQLite, Realm) including migrations and conflict resolution.
• Ownership of mobile CI/CD end to end (Fastlane, GitHub Actions), code signing, provisioning, and App Store Connect release operations.
• Track record of driving measurable improvements in app performance, stability, or engineering velocity — with numbers you can speak to.
• Strong grounding in OOP, design patterns, SOLID, data structures, and algorithms.
• Strong written communication: design docs, RFCs, and post‑mortems that hold up to scrutiny.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and level up engineers, and to build consensus across teams without formal authority.
• Extensive experience with Agile methodologies and strong working knowledge of the SDLC.
• Data‑driven decision‑making and comfort operating with ambiguity in a fast‑paced environment.

Skills

• Mobile security depth: Keychain, certificate pinning, encryption at rest, jailbreak/tamper detection, OWASP MASVS familiarity.
• Experience building and maintaining shared SDKs, internal libraries, or a design system consumed by multiple apps.
• Experience with GraphQL on mobile, including caching and schema evolution.
• Experience with experimentation platforms, feature flagging, and progressive delivery at scale.
• Familiarity with Android/Kotlin sufficient to reason about parity and shared architecture decisions.
• Experience in B2B SaaS, multi‑tenant, or enterprise mobility (MDM, SSO/SAML, on‑prem constraints).
• Accessibility (VoiceOver, Dynamic Type) and internationalization at scale.
• Open‑source contributions, conference talks, or active participation in iOS developer communities.