Staff Engineer - Backend

At Freshworks, we build software that’s fast, reliable, and refreshingly intuitive. As a Staff Engineer – Backend, you’ll play a pivotal role in defining how we architect, scale, and evolve systems that serve millions globally. You’ll go beyond code—you’ll shape system architecture, influence backend direction across teams, and mentor engineers to push the boundaries of what good engineering looks like.

This is a high-impact role for an engineer who’s obsessed with clean architecture, can go deep on time and space complexity, and thrives in solving hard problems with elegance and clarity.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and scale distributed backend systems that are fault-tolerant and extensible.
• Own complex modules end-to-end: from architecture to deployment to monitoring.
• Define and enforce best practices in API design, data modeling, and service modularity.
• Drive optimized code across teams—measurable in performance and maintainability.
• Perform deep dives into production issues and lead root cause analysis with precision.
• Influence cross-team architecture decisions and own long-term technical direction.
• Collaborate with PMs and other engineering leads to shape backend strategy.
• Coach and mentor engineers on design patterns, OOPS principles, and clean coding habits.
• Contribute to system-level performance, availability (targeting 99.99%+ uptime), and security.

Requirements

• 9 to 12 years of experience in backend product development.
• Proven experience building and scaling high-throughput distributed systems.
• Strong grasp of data structures, algorithms, and time/space optimization techniques.
• Expertise in Java (or equivalent), with real-world experience in building production APIs.
• Solid understanding of system design (HLD & LLD) and architectural trade-offs.
• Experience with CI/CD, observability, and cloud-native deployments (AWS/GCP).
• Strong debugging skills, especially in handling live issues under pressure.
• You’ve led architecture reviews, built reusable backend components, and improved code health across teams.