Staff Engineer, Web Operations

Freshworks•San Mateo, CA

1d•$192,000 - $237,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Engineers in Freshworks Marketing build the websites and systems behind the company’s digital experiences, working with designers, marketers, product managers, and infrastructure teams to develop scalable applications, backend services, and content platforms. As a Staff Engineer, you will set technical direction across marketing engineering teams while remaining closely involved in implementation. You will identify gaps in systems, build substantial proof of concepts, and lead architectural changes that improve platform delivery and operations. In partnership with engineering leadership, you will help determine which problems deserve attention and take ownership of solving them. The role calls for deep engineering expertise, critical thinking, curiosity, and extensive use of AI tools while remaining accountable for understanding and verifying their results. You will collaborate openly, communicate reasoning clearly, listen to differing views, share work early, and follow through on commitments. Your work should remove recurring obstacles and enable other engineers to take on more challenging problems. The position is hybrid, with onsite expectations three days per week (Tuesday through Thursday) at an office in San Mateo, California; Bellevue, Washington; or Boston, Massachusetts. The annual base salary range is $192,000–$237,000, and the role is eligible for a target bonus.

Requirements

Experience designing and evolving systems used by multiple teams.
Strong understanding of service boundaries, distributed systems, data flow, caching, and failure handling.
Ability to investigate unfamiliar systems and make sound decisions with incomplete information.
Deep JavaScript and TypeScript knowledge and strong experience with React and Next.js, including rendering, state management, asynchronous behavior, and performance trade-offs.
Hands-on experience building secure APIs, integrating services, and managing asynchronous processing with Node.js; ability to diagnose issues across frontend applications and backend systems.
Strong knowledge of semantic HTML, the DOM and Web APIs, modular CSS, and responsive layouts; experience diagnosing browser behavior, rendering issues, and performance bottlenecks.
Experience with headless CMS architecture, content modeling, and CMS or DAM integrations; familiarity with platforms such as Contentful, Contentstack, or WordPress and their content storage and delivery trade-offs.
Expertise with AWS, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and observability; ability to evaluate deployment approaches and build tooling for development and production support.
Strong understanding of accessible UI patterns, including keyboard navigation, focus management, and assistive technology testing.
Experience defining testing strategies and diagnosing production performance and reliability problems.
Extensive hands-on experience with coding agents, LLM APIs, and automated engineering workflows; understanding of how context, tools, and model limitations affect results.
Ability to judge agent autonomy, intervene when needed, verify work through tests and code review, and select models and manage context to balance quality, speed, and cost.
Ability to represent engineering in discussions with senior leaders, including the C-suite, and explain recommendations in terms of business impact, cost, and timelines.
Ability to adapt technical detail to the audience, answer questions directly, communicate trade-offs and uncertainty, write useful documentation, and give and receive constructive feedback.

Responsibilities

Set architectural direction for web applications, backend services, CMS platforms, and cloud infrastructure; document decisions and provide a practical migration path.
Investigate ambitious ideas and build working proof-of-concept prototypes; explain findings, recommend next steps, and lead promising work into maintainable production systems.
Identify systemic gaps and recurring bottlenecks, trace root causes, evaluate alternatives, and make improvements to performance, reliability, and delivery capabilities.
Develop reusable modules, internal tools, and reference implementations, and support engineers adopting them.
Collaborate with engineering and cross-functional partners across time zones, involve people early in decisions, document context for asynchronous work, raise risks, and follow through on commitments.
Coach lead engineers and technical leads through architectural decisions and team guidance; share expertise through pairing, design reviews, and practical training.
Use code and design reviews to improve maintainability, testing, and operational reliability, and translate accessibility, security, and privacy requirements into implementation and testing practices.
Build and improve AI workflows for investigation, prototyping, and production; define agent context, access, and verification, teach engineers how to direct and review agents, and refine practices over time.
Communicate architectural risks and opportunities to engineering and business leaders, explain costs, dependencies, and expected benefits, and help plan technical work alongside existing commitments.