Engineering Manager - AI Platforms

Company Description

Organizations everywhere struggle under the crushing costs and complexities of “solutions” that promise to simplify their lives. To create 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

About the Role:

Freshworks is seeking a strong and experienced Engineering Manager to lead the engineering charter for AI Platforms, focused on building and scaling foundational platforms and middleware services that power AI/ML workloads.

This role demands technical and strategic leadership in the areas of platform engineering, distributed systems, and managing machine learning services. You will lead a team that develops high-scale, low-latency AI core services which includes discriminative and Gen AI integrations.

Experience in building platform services at scale, with exposure to machine learning (ML), MLOps, or GenAI systems is highly valued.

Responsibilities:

- Own the technical vision, roadmap, and architecture of core AI platform services

- Drive execution across cross-functional engineering squads to build scalable, reliable, and reusable platform components.

- Manage and mentor a high-performing team of engineers, fostering career growth and technical depth.

- Partner with AI/ML scientists, MLEs, System engineers, product managers, and architects to translate AI research and use cases into production ready services.

- Champion engineering best practices including CI/CD, observability, fault tolerance, and performance.

- Drive quality, reliability, and efficiency through code and architectural reviews, system observability, and testing standards.

- Influence and evolve the broader AI platform strategy at Freshworks through thought leadership.

- Own delivery, SLAs, and operational excellence for AI platform services.

- Contribute to hiring and shaping the engineering culture within the team and organization.

Qualifications

- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent work experience)

- 10+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3+ years in people management roles

- Strong background in building and operating platform-level or middleware services at scale.

- Strong design and architecture skills, especially in distributed systems, backend services, APIs, infrastructure and Ops

- Set and uphold systems engineering standards around service performance, reliability, and observability—driving metric instrumentation, performance benchmarking, and a strong on-call and incident response culture

- Excellent programming skills in one or more languages (Java, Python, Go, etc.)

- Passion for coaching, growing engineers, and helping them achieve their potential

- Proven track record of driving technical and process improvements at an organizational level

- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills

- Experience building machine learning platforms, GenAI integration, or MLOps tooling is a significant plus

Additional Information

At Freshworks, we are creating a global workplace that enables everyone to find their true potential, purpose, and passion irrespective of their background, gender, race, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity. We are committed to providing equal opportunity for all and believe that diversity in the workplace creates a more vibrant, richer work environment that advances the goals of our employees, communities and the business.