Lead System / Data Engineer

Freshworks' Analytics Platform Team is seeking an experienced Lead System/Data Engineer to drive the implementation of our technology roadmap and elevate our platforms to industry-leading standards. In this role, you will collaborate with a dynamic team of engineers, taking ownership of one or more platform services. You will partner closely with architects and product managers to build highly scalable, reliable, and millisecond-efficient distributed systems that operate at internet scale and maintain high availability. Your responsibilities will encompass end-to-end ownership, from system design and development to testing, deployment, and ongoing production support. We are looking for individuals with a strong passion for engineering best practices, a proven ability to plan and execute goals, and a desire to shape the future technology vision of the Freshworks Platform.

Responsibilities:

• Independently design, develop, and maintain data-intensive applications.
• Implement robust ETL pipelines to ingest data from diverse distributed sources.
• Ensure the availability, scalability, reliability, and performance of our big data systems.
• Maintain high availability and uptime targets for production systems.
• Develop and execute strategic goals with a demonstrated track record of success.
• Champion and uphold strong engineering best practices within the team.
• Collaborate with product owners on planning and roadmap development.
• Communicate and coordinate effectively with cross-functional teams across Freshworks.
• Mentor and guide junior engineers within the team.
• Take ownership of a broad scope of responsibilities in a self-sufficient platform team environment.

Requirements:

• Extensive experience building big data ETL data pipelines and streaming applications using Spark (PySpark), Kafka, and other big data frameworks.
• Proficiency in data warehousing concepts and OLAP databases such as Snowflake, Redshift, and Lakehouse architectures.
• Strong expertise in SQL, data modeling, optimizing complex joins, and database fundamentals.
• Solid programming experience in languages like Python and Java.
• Proven track record in building and operating scalable, fault-tolerant, distributed systems for large-scale, data-intensive applications.
• Experience with infrastructure scaling and cost optimization strategies.
• Excellent documentation skills, with the ability to translate product requirements into detailed technical design documents.
• Demonstrated success in handling production workloads and troubleshooting complex issues.
• Experience in Cloud/SaaS environments.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.
• A minimum of 8 years of relevant professional experience.

Additional Information:

• Experience in the analytics and business intelligence domain is highly desirable.
• Familiarity with technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, query engines (Trino, Presto), and Apache Airflow is a plus.
• Ability to influence product roadmaps by exploring new possibilities and conducting Proofs of Concept (POCs).