Engineering Manager

📋 Description

• • Own the complete engineering lifecycle for a high-impact product line at Freshworks, setting the vision, standards, and culture that enable 30+ engineers to deliver secure, scalable, and delightful SaaS experiences to 50,000+ customers worldwide.
• • Architect and evolve a micro-services platform that handles 2 billion API calls per month with 99.9 % uptime, making technology choices (languages, frameworks, data stores, cloud infra) that balance innovation velocity, operational excellence, and cost efficiency.
• • Translate ambitious product roadmaps into quarterly engineering OKRs, decomposing epics into sprint-ready user stories while simultaneously carving out 20 % capacity to burn down technical debt and modernize legacy components.
• • Coach, mentor, and level-up a diverse team of backend, frontend, and DevOps engineers—running weekly 1:1s, quarterly growth plans, and bi-annual performance reviews that turn promising junior talent into confident tech leads and future managers.
• • Foster a culture of psychological safety and continuous improvement: introduce blameless post-mortems, code-review scorecards, automated testing gates, and CI/CD pipelines that cut release cycle time from days to minutes.
• • Partner with Product Management, UX, and Data Science to prioritize features, run A/B experiments, and interpret telemetry that guides data-driven product decisions and maximizes customer adoption and revenue impact.
• • Own production reliability end-to-end: define SLIs/SLOs, set up on-call rotations, manage incident response, and coordinate with Customer Support to ensure critical bugs are triaged, root-caused, and resolved within SLA.
• • Collaborate with Talent Acquisition to craft compelling job specs, conduct bar-raising interviews, and scale the team by 30 % year-over-year while maintaining a high hiring bar and inclusive culture.
• • Drive cross-team initiatives such as shared libraries, security guilds, and architecture review boards that raise the technical bar across the entire Chennai engineering org.
• • Communicate transparently upward and outward: publish monthly engineering newsletters, present quarterly business reviews to VPs, and evangelize the team’s achievements in internal tech talks and external conferences.
• • Champion engineering excellence metrics—deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, MTTR—and use them to identify bottlenecks, justify tooling investments, and celebrate wins that keep morale high.
• • Balance short-term delivery pressure with long-term platform health, negotiating scope trade-offs, negotiating tech-debt sprints, and securing executive buy-in for refactor initiatives that prevent future fires.
• • Stay hands-on when needed: review critical pull requests, prototype spikes for new services, and debug gnarly production issues alongside your engineers to stay credible and connected to the codebase.
• • Promote a customer-first mindset by shadowing support calls, analyzing NPS feedback, and ensuring every feature ships with observability, rollback plans, and user-facing documentation that reduces friction and churn.