Senior Staff Engineer - Test

Overview At Freshworks, quality isn’t a checkpoint—it’s built into our engineering DNA. As a Senior Staff Engineer in Test (IC5), you will serve as the principal technical authority for test architecture, automation strategy, and quality engineering across multi-tenant, enterprise-grade SaaS platforms. You will operate at the intersection of complex distributed systems, developer velocity, performance engineering, and product confidence—ensuring our global platform scales effortlessly without compromising reliability. If you are an engineering leader who architects for scale, solves complex distributed system challenges, and drives systemic quality culture across organizations—this role is built for you. Impact You Can Create Architect Systemic Quality at Scale: Define and own the multi-year quality architecture vision for core platform services used by tens of thousands of global businesses daily. Accelerate Developer Velocity: Eliminate deployment friction by designing self-healing, high-throughput, and parallelized automation frameworks embedded directly into our CI/CD pipelines. Drive Shift-Left & AI Innovation: Pioneer modern quality engineering paradigms—including contract testing, chaos engineering, shadow testing, and AI-assisted automation—to catch architectural flaws long before code reaches production. Elevate Engineering Standards: Establish the bar for test code quality, framework design patterns, and non-functional resilience across all engineering pods. Roles & Responsibilities Technical & Automation Architecture: Design, build, and scale unified test automation frameworks across UI, API, microservices, and asynchronous event-driven architectures (Kafka, Webhooks, Message Queues). Cross-Pod Technical Governance: Partner with Engineering Directors, Principal Architects, and Product Managers to define quality roadmaps, risk-based testing strategies, and release governance protocols. Non-Functional Engineering: Lead organization-wide performance, load, stress, chaos, and resilience testing strategies using APM and monitoring tools to guarantee 99.99% availability. DevOps & Pipeline Integration: Collaborate with Infrastructure and DevOps teams to integrate automated quality gates, ephemeral test environments, and observability into modern CI/CD pipelines. Defect Prevention & Root Cause Analysis: Lead complex debugging, deep-dive root cause analysis (RCA), and systemic defect prevention across distributed microservice ecosystems. Security & Compliance : Partner with Security on penetration testing, vulnerability scans, and secure SDLC practices.Ensure QA process supports compliance audits (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR) Mentorship & Talent Elevation: Act as a technical force multiplier—reviewing critical code, championing RFCs, establishing best practices, and mentoring Lead and Staff Engineers across QA and Development teams.

Experience: 12+ years of progressive software engineering in test / QA automation experience, with a proven track record operating as a principal technical leader (IC4/IC5 level). Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline. Proven Track Record: Demonstrated success in designing and scaling enterprise automation architectures from scratch for high-throughput, multi-tenant cloud platforms. Strategic Influence: Proven ability to drive technical consensus, articulate technical trade-offs to senior leadership, and influence quality culture across cross-functional organizations. Domain Expertise: Deep experience in distributed cloud architectures, event-driven systems, microservices, and SaaS product delivery. Skills Core Technical & DSA Expertise: Mastery of Data Structures, Algorithms, Object-Oriented Design (OOD), and Software Architecture Patterns (Page Object, Factory, Builder, Singleton) to write production-grade test software. Multi-Stack Automation Mastery: Deep hands-on proficiency in languages like Java, Python, or