Lead Software Engineer - Site Reliability

Job Title: Site Reliability Engineer (DBRE)
Job Type: Full-time
Level: IC3 

About the Role

At Freshworks, uptime is sacred. As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), you'll be the engineer behind the curtain—designing for resilience, automating recovery, and ensuring our systems stay fast, stable, and observable at scale. You’ll partner closely with engineering, platform, and product teams to shift reliability left and set the standard for performance and availability.

If you live for clean telemetry, root cause resolution, and engineering chaos into confidence, this is your playground.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement tools to improve availability, latency, scalability, and system health.

• Define SLIs/SLOs, manage error budgets, and drive performance engineering efforts.

• Build and maintain automated monitoring, alerting, and remediation pipelines.

• Collaborate with engineering teams to improve reliability by design.

• Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and blameless postmortems.

• Champion observability across services—logs, metrics, traces.

• Contribute to infrastructure architecture, automation, and reliability roadmaps.

• Advocate for SRE best practices across teams and functions.

Requirements

• 7–12 years of experience in SRE, DevOps, or Production Engineering roles.

• Coding Proficiency: Develop clear, efficient, and well-structured code.

• Linux Expertise: In-depth knowledge of Linux for system administration and advanced troubleshooting.

• Containerization & Orchestration: Practical experience with Docker and Kubernetes for application deployment and management.

• CI/CD Management: Design, implement, and maintain Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines.

• Security & Compliance: Understand security best practices and compliance in infrastructure.

• High Availability & Scalability: Design and implement highly available, scalable, and resilient distributed systems.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) & Automation: Proficient in IaC tools and automating infrastructure provisioning and management.

• Disaster Recovery (DR) & High Availability (HA): Deep knowledge and practical experience with various DR and HA strategies.

• Observability: Implement and utilize monitoring, logging, and tracing tools for system health.

• System Design (Distributed Systems): Design complex distributed systems with a focus on reliability and operations.

• Problem-Solving & Troubleshooting: Excellent analytical and diagnostic skills for resolving complex system issues.

Technical Skills & Experience

• Extensive hands-on experience of 7-12 Years with relational databases (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) and distributed NoSQL systems (e.g., Cassandra, MongoDB, DynamoDB).

• Proven track record of designing and operating databases in large-scale cloud-native environments (AWS, GCP, Azure).

• Strong programming skills in Python, Go, or Bash for building infrastructure tooling and automation frameworks.

• Expertise with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Helm, Ansible) and Kubernetes for managing production database systems.

• Deep knowledge of database replication, clustering, backup/restore, and failover techniques.

• Advanced experience with observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic) for monitoring distributed databases.

• Strong communication skills and ability to influence across teams and levels.

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.

• Experience building and scaling services in production with high uptime targets (99.99%+).

• Clear track record of reducing incident frequency and improving response metrics (MTTD/MTTR).

• Strong communicator who thrives in high-pressure environments.

• Passionate about automation, chaos engineering, and making things just work.

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.