Senior Director - Engineering

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.

Freshworks Inc. builds uncomplicated service software that delivers exceptional employee and customer experiences. Our people-first approach to AI eliminates friction, helping businesses reduce complexity, lower cost-to-serve, and deliver faster, more human support through enterprise-grade yet easy-to-use CX and IT solutions. Nearly 75,000 companies, including Bridgestone, New Balance, Nucor, S&P Global, and Sony Music, trust Freshworks to power their Employee Experience (EX) and Customer Experience (CX) operations. FireHydrant, a Freshworks company, extends this mission to modern engineering teams, helping them manage incidents, reduce downtime, and operate with confidence across organizations with cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, fintech, gaming, and e-commerce.

Fresh vision. Real impact. Come build it with us.

Freshworks is seeking a Senior Director of Engineering to lead and scale the IT Operations Management (ITOM) product engineering organization based in San Mateo. This leader will be responsible for shaping the technical vision, driving execution at scale, and elevating organizational maturity across AIOps and Observability platforms that power Freshworks’ IT management offerings.

This role is suited for a seasoned leader of leaders who brings a strong track record of building and scaling high-performing engineering organizations, influencing cross-functional strategy, and delivering complex, AI-driven, cloud-native platforms. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with organizational leadership, enabling teams to operate with autonomy, accountability, and high impact.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and scale a multi-layered engineering organization, including managers and senior leaders, across the ITOM product portfolio (AIOps, Observability, and related platforms)
• Define and drive long-term engineering vision and strategy for AI-driven operations, monitoring, alerting, root-cause analysis, and system observability
• Partner with Product and Executive Leadership to shape roadmap priorities, aligning technical investments with business outcomes and customer impact
• Own organizational execution at scale, ensuring predictable delivery across multiple teams working on complex, distributed systems
• Elevate engineering excellence and operational maturity across architecture, data platforms, ML/AI integration, reliability, and developer productivity
• Drive cross-functional alignment with Data, AI/ML, Infrastructure, SRE, Security, and Platform teams to deliver cohesive, end-to-end ITOM capabilities
• Establish and evolve engineering operating models, including planning, prioritization, capacity management, and metrics-driven execution
• Build and develop a strong leadership bench, mentoring engineering managers and senior leaders while creating clear succession pathways
• Influence organizational and technical direction beyond immediate team scope, contributing to broader platform and company-wide engineering initiatives
• Champion a culture of accountability, ownership, and customer-first thinking, while fostering innovation and continuous improvement
• Own and improve key engineering and operational metrics (reliability, scalability, latency, incident reduction, and efficiency) at an organizational level

Please note this is a hybrid role with onsite expectations of 3x/week (Tuesday - Thursday) from our San Mateo, CA headquarters. 

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field
• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 8–10+ years in engineering leadership roles, including managing managers and senior leaders
• Proven experience leading large, multi-team or multi-org engineering functions in ITOM, APM, observability, or infrastructure platforms
• Strong background in distributed systems, microservices architecture, and high-scale SaaS platforms
• Experience operating at organizational scale, balancing multiple priorities, stakeholders, and long-term technical investments
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and modern DevOps practices
• Experience delivering or integrating AIOps, machine learning, or data-driven intelligence into production systems
• Demonstrated success in building leadership depth, hiring and developing engineering managers and senior technical leaders

The annual base salary range for this position is $296,000 - $365,000. 

Compensation is based on a variety of factors including but not limited to location, experience, job-related skills, and level. Bonus/equity may be available.

Freshworks offers multiple options for dental, medical, vision, disability and life insurances. 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.