Senior Staff Engineer - Test

Freshworks; Chennai District; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 6,500,000; Full time

Job summary

Freshworks in Chennai, India is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer in Test (IC5) to lead test architecture, automation strategy, and quality across multi-tenant SaaS platforms. You will shape the quality roadmap and drive systemic improvements in performance, reliability, and developer velocity.

You will architect for scale, drive chaos testing, and champion governance across distributed systems. Lead and mentor QA and development teams to elevate testing across the organization.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of progressive software engineering in test / QA automation.

Responsibilities

• Technical & Automation Architecture: Design, build, and scale unified test automation frameworks across UI, API, microservices, and asynchronous event-driven architectures (Kafka, Webhooks, Message Queues).
• Cross-Pod Technical Governance: Partner with Engineering Directors, Principal Architects, and Product Managers to define quality roadmaps, risk-based testing strategies, and release governance protocols.
• Non-Functional Engineering: Lead organization-wide performance, load, stress, chaos, and resilience testing strategies using APM and monitoring tools to guarantee 99.99% availability.
• DevOps & Pipeline Integration: Collaborate with Infrastructure and DevOps teams to integrate automated quality gates, ephemeral test environments, and observability into modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Defect Prevention & Root Cause Analysis: Lead complex debugging, deep-dive root cause analysis (RCA), and systemic defect prevention across distributed microservice ecosystems.
• Security & Compliance: Partner with Security on penetration testing, vulnerability scans, and secure SDLC practices. Ensure QA process supports compliance audits (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR).
• Mentorship & Talent Elevation: Act as a technical force multiplier—reviewing critical code, championing RFCs, establishing best practices, and mentoring Lead and Staff Engineers across QA and Development teams.

Skills

Java

Python

JavaScript/TypeScript

Test automation architecture

QA leadership

Distributed systems

CI/CD pipelines

RFC writing

AI-powered testing

Cloud-native

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering

Tools

Playwright

Cypress

Selenium

RestAssured

Appium

JMeter

K6

Datadog

New Relic

Prometheus

Grafana

Kafka

RabbitMQ

AWS

GCP

Docker

Kubernetes

Jenkins

GitHub Actions

Job description

Job Description

Overview

At Freshworks, quality isn’t a checkpoint—it’s built into our engineering DNA. As a Senior Staff Engineer in Test (IC5), you will serve as the principal technical authority for test architecture, automation strategy, and quality engineering across multi-tenant, enterprise-grade SaaS platforms. You will operate at the intersection of complex distributed systems, developer velocity, performance engineering, and product confidence—ensuring our global platform scales effortlessly without compromising reliability.

If you are an engineering leader who architects for scale, solves complex distributed system challenges, and drives systemic quality culture across organizations—this role is built for you.

Impact You Can Create

• Architect Systemic Quality at Scale: Define and own the multi-year quality architecture vision for core platform services used by tens of thousands of global businesses daily.
• Accelerate Developer Velocity: Eliminate deployment friction by designing self-healing, high-throughput, and parallelized automation frameworks embedded directly into our CI/CD pipelines.
• Drive Shift-Left & AI Innovation: Pioneer modern quality engineering paradigms—including contract testing, chaos engineering, shadow testing, and AI-assisted automation to catch architectural flaws long before code reaches production.
• Elevate Engineering Standards: Establish the bar for test code quality, framework design patterns, and non-functional resilience across all engineering pods.

Roles & Responsibilities

• Technical & Automation Architecture: Design, build, and scale unified test automation frameworks across UI, API, microservices, and asynchronous event-driven architectures (Kafka, Webhooks, Message Queues).
• Cross-Pod Technical Governance: Partner with Engineering Directors, Principal Architects, and Product Managers to define quality roadmaps, risk-based testing strategies, and release governance protocols.
• Non-Functional Engineering: Lead organization-wide performance, load, stress, chaos, and resilience testing strategies using APM and monitoring tools to guarantee 99.99% availability.
• DevOps & Pipeline Integration: Collaborate with Infrastructure and DevOps teams to integrate automated quality gates, ephemeral test environments, and observability into modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Defect Prevention & Root Cause Analysis: Lead complex debugging, deep-dive root cause analysis (RCA), and systemic defect prevention across distributed microservice ecosystems.
• Security & Compliance: Partner with Security on penetration testing, vulnerability scans, and secure SDLC practices. Ensure QA process supports compliance audits (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR).
• Mentorship & Talent Elevation: Act as a technical force multiplier—reviewing critical code, championing RFCs, establishing best practices, and mentoring Lead and Staff Engineers across QA and Development teams.

Qualifications

• Experience: 12+ years of progressive software engineering in test / QA automation experience, with a proven track record operating as a principal technical leader (IC4/IC5 level).
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Proven Track Record: Demonstrated success in designing and scaling enterprise automation architectures from scratch for high-throughput, multi-tenant cloud platforms.
• Strategic Influence: Proven ability to drive technical consensus, articulate technical trade-offs to senior leadership, and influence quality culture across cross-functional organizations.
• Domain Expertise: Deep experience in distributed cloud architectures, event-driven systems, microservices, and SaaS product delivery.

Skills

• Core Technical & DSA Expertise: Mastery of Data Structures, Algorithms, Object-Oriented Design (OOD), and Software Architecture Patterns (Page Object, Factory, Builder, Singleton) to write production-grade test software.
• Multi-Stack Automation Mastery: Deep hands-on proficiency in languages like Java, Python, or JavaScript/TypeScript, alongside modern framework ecosystems (Playwright, Cypress, Selenium, RestAssured, Appium).
• Performance & Resilience Engineering: Expertise in load testing tools (JMeter, K6, Locust), resilience testing (Chaos Mesh, Gremlin), and application performance observability (Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana).
• Cloud & Distributed Systems: Hands-on experience with AWS/GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Microservices, REST/GraphQL APIs, SQL/NoSQL databases, and Kafka/RabbitMQ.
• CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code: Advanced knowledge of build and pipeline systems (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Harness) and shift-left quality gating techniques.
• Leadership & Communication: Exceptional RFC writing, architectural documentation, data-driven decision making (tracking DORA & quality metrics), and cross-functional stakeholder management.
• Hands-on with AI-powered test generation & self-healing automation tools (Testim, Mabl, Applitools).
• AI: Building evaluation frameworks for AI/LLM features: accuracy, hallucination, bias, prompt regression. AI-driven risk-based test selection & predictive defect analysis to optimize test runs. Governance for AI-assisted code: extra review rigor for Copilot/Claude Code-generated commits.

Additional Information

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.