Senior Director, Engineering - AI Studio (CX & EX)

At Freshworks, we are building the future of customer and employee engagement - and AI agents are at the center of it. The AI Agent Platform is the foundation on which our next generation of autonomous and assistive experiences are built. AI Studio is the product surface that brings that platform to life: the place where builders design, test, deploy, observe, and continuously optimize AI agents that ship inside our CX and EX products. We are looking for a visionary engineering leader to own AI Studio end to end. As the Senior Director of Engineering for AI Studio, you will lead a dynamic, multi-disciplinary organization that builds the front-end experience and the Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) layer for the AI Agent Platform, and embeds these capabilities natively within our CX and EX product lines. This is a pivotal, high-visibility role with the opportunity to shape how thousands of businesses build and operate AI agents - setting the bar for craftsmanship, developer experience, reliability, and scale. Key Responsibilities Lead a dynamic, multi-disciplinary organization of engineers and engineering managers spanning front-end, BFF/services, and platform integration. Own the vision and technical execution for AI Studio - the end-to-end experience to build, test, deploy, observe, and optimize AI agents on the AI Agent Platform. Deliver a best-in-class front end and a robust Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) layer that expose the AI Agent Platform’s capabilities to builders with speed, trust, and clarity. Embed AI Studio natively within both CX and EX product lines, ensuring a seamless, consistent builder and end-user experience across surfaces. Establish the agent lifecycle as a first-class product: authoring and configuration, testing and evaluation, safe deployment, live observability, and data-driven optimization. Partner deeply with the AI Agent Platform, AI/ML, and Data Science teams to surface state-of-the-art models, tools, and orchestration capabilities through intuitive workflows. Define and track impact: agent build velocity, time-to-deploy, adoption, agent quality and containment/deflection, reliability, and measurable ROI for CX and EX customers. Establish governance and trust: access controls, guardrails, data classification, privacy/PII handling, auditability, and compliance-ready practices for agent workflows. What You’ll Do Set the AI Studio vision: Define the strategy, roadmap, and operating model for a unified studio experience that lets builders create, test, deploy, observe, and optimize AI agents across CX and EX. Own the full builder journey: Ship the front-end and BFF that make agent authoring, configuration, and iteration fast, intuitive, and reliable - from first prototype to production at scale. Deliver testing & evaluation: Build the tooling for agent testing, simulation, and evaluation (quality, safety, regression) so teams ship agents with confidence and measurable quality bars. Enable safe, scalable deployment: Provide deployment, versioning, and rollout controls that let teams promote agents across environments with strong guardrails and zero-downtime expectations. Build observability & optimization: Deliver real-time monitoring, tracing, and analytics for live agents - surfacing quality, latency, cost, and outcome signals - and close the loop so insights drive continuous optimization. Embed across CX & EX: Ensure AI Studio integrates natively into Freshworks CX and EX products, delivering a consistent experience while respecting the needs of each product line. Lead & inspire: Cultivate a high-performance, inclusive culture across a multi-tiered organization of engineers and managers. Mentor the next generation of technical leaders and build a team known for technical excellence and execution velocity. Execute with excellence: Master the full development lifecycle, from strategic planning and roadmap management to deployment and operations. Champion agile, iterative delivery to ship exceptional products u