Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Reliability engineering remains a defining capability for SaaS businesses operating customer-facing platforms with high availability expectations. This Lead Software Engineer role in Site Reliability stands out because it centers on the operational mechanics that keep multi-service products dependable—observability, incident response, and performance engineering—rather than feature delivery alone. In a company serving large numbers of customers, these disciplines tend to be deeply intertwined with product experience and trust.
From a SaaS career perspective, the work maps closely to mature operating models: establishing SLIs/SLOs, managing error budgets, and building automation that reduces toil while improving recovery. Experience designing for resilience across Kubernetes-based environments, CI/CD systems, and infrastructure-as-code is broadly portable across modern SaaS organizations, particularly those scaling distributed systems and standardizing platform practices across teams.
This role is best suited to engineers who prefer measurable outcomes and systems thinking—people who enjoy turning ambiguous production signals into clear priorities and durable fixes. It also fits professionals who want influence beyond a single service, partnering with engineering and product groups to “shift reliability left” and set patterns others can adopt.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
Company Description
Organizations everywhere struggle under the crushing costs and complexities of “solutions” that promise to simplify their lives. To create a better experience for their customers and employees. To help them grow. Software is a choice that can make or break a business. Create better or worse experiences. Propel or throttle growth. Business software has become a blocker instead of ways to get work done.
There’s another option. Freshworks. With a fresh vision for how the world works.
At Freshworks, we build uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional customer and employee experiences. Our enterprise-grade solutions are powerful, yet easy to use, and quick to deliver results. Our people-first approach to AI eliminates friction, making employees more effective and organizations more productive. Over 72,000 companies, including Bridgestone, New Balance, Nucor, S&P Global, and Sony Music, trust Freshworks’ customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) software to fuel customer loyalty and service efficiency. And, over 4,500 Freshworks employees make this possible, all around the world.
Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.
Job Description
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.
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.
Qualifications
- 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.
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.
