Staff Engineer, Web Operations

About this role

Full timeTechnology

Staff Engineer, Web Operations

FreshworksSan Mateo, CA🇺🇸United States

Quick overview

Salary$192k - $237k/yr

SeniorityMid Senior

Employment typeFull Time

Work modeHybrid

LocationSan Mateo, CA, United States

Next.jsNode.jsAWSCSSHTMLJavaScriptLLMReactTypeScriptWordPressCI/CD

Job 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.

Engineers in Freshworks Marketing build the websites and systems behind our digital experiences. They work with designers, marketers, product managers, and infrastructure teams to develop scalable applications, backend services, and content platforms.

Role Description

As a Staff Engineer, you will set technical direction across our marketing engineering teams and stay closely involved in implementation. You will identify gaps in our systems, build substantial proof of concepts, and lead architectural changes that improve how we deliver and operate our platforms. Working with engineering leadership, you will help decide which problems deserve attention and take ownership of solving them.

We are looking for deep engineering expertise and strong critical thinking. You should be curious about how things work, question assumptions, and follow problems through the code and its dependencies. You will use AI extensively to investigate and build as well as assist throughout your day. You remain responsible for understanding the results and knowing when to steer the work or change course.

How you work with people matters. We want someone colleagues can approach with a question or a different view. Explain your thinking clearly, listen carefully, and be willing to change your mind when the evidence warrants it. Share work early and follow through on commitments. Your work should remove recurring obstacles and help other engineers take on harder problems.

Responsibilities

• Set Full Stack Architectural Direction: Define how our web applications, backend services, CMS platforms, and cloud infrastructure should evolve together. Document the reasoning behind decisions and give teams a practical path from the current architecture to the next.
• Lead Proof of Concepts: Autonomously investigate ambitious ideas and build working prototypes to find out whether an approach will work. Explain what you learned and recommend which ideas to pursue. Lead the work to turn promising prototypes into reliable production systems that the team can maintain.
• Find and Solve Systemic Problems: Identify gaps and recurring bottlenecks across our platforms. Trace root causes, weigh alternatives, and make changes that improve performance, reliability, or the team's ability to deliver. Balance longer-term improvements with current commitments.
• Build Shared Tools: Develop reusable modules, internal tools, and reference implementations that solve problems across teams. Help engineers adopt them and address problems they encounter.
• Collaborate with International Teams: Work closely with engineering and cross-functional partners across time zones. Bring people into decisions early, explain complex work clearly, and document enough context for others to contribute asynchronously. Raise risks promptly and keep agreed follow-ups moving.
• Coach Engineers and Technical Leads: Help lead engineers work through architectural decisions and guide their teams. Share your expertise through pairing, design reviews, and practical training. Encourage questions and help engineers develop their own technical judgment.
• Set Engineering Standards: Use code and design reviews to improve maintainability, testing, and operational reliability across teams. Work with the relevant partners to translate accessibility, security, and privacy requirements into implementation and testing practices.
• Lead AI Use Across the Team: Build and improve AI workflows for investigation, prototyping, and production work. Define what agents need to know, what they can access, and how their work will be checked. Teach engineers how to direct the agents and review their output. Refine these practices as the team uses them.
• Shape Technical Priorities: Bring architectural risks and opportunities to engineering and business leaders. Explain the costs, dependencies, and expected benefits of proposed work so leaders can make informed decisions. Help teams plan the work alongside existing commitments.
• Architecture and Problem Solving: 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.
• JavaScript and TypeScript: Deep language knowledge and strong experience with React and Next.js, including rendering, state management, asynchronous behavior, and performance trade-offs.
• Node.js and Backend Systems: Hands-on experience building secure APIs, integrating services, and managing asynchronous processing. Ability to diagnose problems across frontend applications and backend systems.
• HTML and CSS: Strong knowledge of semantic markup, DOM and Web APIs, modular CSS, and responsive layouts. Experience diagnosing browser behavior, rendering issues, and performance bottlenecks.
• CMS and Content Platforms: Experience with headless CMS architecture, content modeling, and CMS or DAM integrations. Familiarity with platforms such as Contentful, Contentstack, or WordPress, and the trade-offs in how content is stored and delivered.
• Cloud Infrastructure and Tooling: Expertise with AWS, CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and observability. Ability to evaluate deployment approaches and build tooling that improves development and production support.
• Accessibility and Quality: Strong understanding of accessible UI patterns, including keyboard navigation, focus management, and assistive technology testing. Experience defining testing strategies and diagnosing performance and reliability problems in production.
• AI Engineering and Automation: Extensive hands-on experience with coding agents, LLM APIs, and automated engineering workflows. Understand how context, tools, and model limitations affect results. Judge when to give agents autonomy, when to intervene, and how to verify their work through tests and code review. Choose models and manage context to balance quality, speed, and cost.
• Technical Communication: Ability to represent engineering in discussions with senior leaders, up to and including the C-suite. Explain recommendations in terms of business impact, cost, and timelines. Adjust the level of detail to the audience, answer questions directly, and be clear about trade-offs and uncertainty. Write useful documentation and give and receive constructive feedback.

Please note this is a hybrid role with onsite expectations of 3x/week (Tues - Thurs) from our office locations in either of the following: San Mateo, CA, Bellevue, WA, or Boston, MA.

The annual base salary range for this position is $ 192,000- $237,000.This role is also eligible for a target bonus.

Compensation is based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to location, experience, job-related skills, and level.

Freshworks offers multiple options for dental, medical, vision, disability, and life insurance. Equity + ESPP, flexible PTO, flexible spending, commuter benefits, and wellness benefits are also offered. Freshworks also offers adoption and parental leave benefits.

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.