Lead Software Engineer - Mobile (Android)

Location: Chennai, in

Company 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.

Job Description

About the Team

We’re a passionate and fun-loving mobile team made up of Android, iOS, and automation engineers, with a solid mix of experience and energy. We build and maintain multiple mobile apps and multiple mobile SDKs, powering user experiences at scale.

Our portfolio includes:

Apps: Freshdesk, Freshchat, Freshcaller, and Freshsales (all on Android & iOS)

SDKs: Freshchat SDK (for Android, iOS, React Native, and Flutter)

Our impact?

Over 200,000 active app users

More than 200 million active SDK users

If you're excited about working across high-impact apps and building SDKs that scale globally, you’ll feel right at home with us.

Overview of the Role

As a Lead Android Engineer, you own the technical direction of one or more of our Android apps and SDKs. You set the architectural standard, make the consequential technology calls, and are accountable for the stability, performance, and release health of your surface area. Because our SDKs are embedded in thousands of third-party applications reaching over 200 million users, you carry a bar most Android roles never encounter: every public API you ship is a long-term contract, and every regression is someone else's production incident.

You lead through design reviews, mentorship, and hands-on pairing rather than through hierarchy, and you partner directly with Product, Design, Backend, and QA to shape what gets built — not just to execute it. You remain a hands-on engineer: you write code in the hardest parts of the system, and your judgement is the escalation point when the team is stuck.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own and evolve the Android architecture across apps and SDKs — Gradle module boundaries, dependency graph, state management, navigation, and offline/sync strategy.

• Make and document consequential technical decisions (Views → Jetpack Compose adoption, third-party dependency selection, persistence and caching strategy, native vs cross-platform) with explicit trade-off analysis and a migration path.

• Author and drive technical design documents; run design reviews and hold the bar on Clean Architecture, MVVM/MVI, SOLID, and pattern consistency across teams.

• Lead large-scale refactors and migrations with incremental, low-risk rollout plans — no big-bang rewrites.

• Identify and remove systemic technical debt; maintain a prioritized architecture backlog reviewed with Product and Engineering Management.

SDK Ownership & API Stewardship

• Own public SDK API design — clean, minimal, hard-to-misuse surfaces, with deliberate decisions about what becomes permanent contract.

• Own semantic versioning, backward compatibility, and deprecation policy; guarantee that host applications can upgrade without breakage.

• Defend the integration footprint: binary/method-count impact, transitive dependency conflicts with host apps, consumer R8/ProGuard rules, manifest merger behaviour, and minSdk/targetSdk policy.

• Own SDK integration documentation, sample apps, migration guides, and release notes.

• Lead technical discussions with customer and partner engineering teams — integration reviews, escalations, and root-cause analysis on their production issues.

• Maintain parity and consistency of behaviour across Android, iOS, React Native, and Flutter SDK variants in partnership with the iOS and cross-platform leads.

Delivery & Execution

• Break down ambiguous, multi-quarter initiatives into scoped, sequenced, estimable work for the team.

• Stay hands-on: personally deliver the highest-risk components, prototypes, and performance-critical paths.

• Own the release train — versioning, release branching, staged rollouts and halts in Play Console, Play App Signing, kill switches, and rollback procedures for both apps and SDK artifact publishing (Maven Central / internal repositories).

• Own build and developer productivity: Gradle build times, convention plugins and version catalogs, flaky test elimination, and CI/CD reliability.

• Drive integration contracts with backend teams for REST and GraphQL APIs, including versioning, backward compatibility, and error-handling standards.

• Own annual targetSdk compliance, Play policy and Data Safety obligations, and forward-compatibility work against new Android releases.

Quality, Performance & Reliability

• Define and enforce the quality bar: test strategy across unit, integration, and instrumentation layers; coverage expectations; and mandatory quality gates in CI.

• Own crash-free session rate, ANR rate, cold-start and frame-timing budgets, App Bundle size, and battery/network efficiency; set targets and report against them.

• Profile and optimize using Android Studio Profiler, Macrobenchmark, Baseline Profiles, Perfetto, StrictMode, and Play Vitals; lead investigations that cross app, SDK, and backend boundaries.

• Own correctness across device and OEM fragmentation — background execution limits, doze/battery-optimization behaviour, WorkManager reliability, permission model changes, and vendor-specific quirks.

• Act as incident commander for production mobile incidents — triage, mitigate, communicate, and run blameless post-mortems with tracked action items.

• Define observability standards: crash reporting, structured logging, analytics events, feature flags, and remote config (Firebase Crashlytics / Sentry, Remote Config).

Mentorship, Collaboration & Influence

• Mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers; grow at least one engineer to the next level through structured feedback and stretch ownership.

• Own code review culture — set expectations for review depth and turnaround, and coach through reviews rather than gatekeeping.

• Drive the hiring bar for Android: design and calibrate interview loops, conduct architecture and coding interviews, and support onboarding.

• Provide input to Engineering Managers on performance, growth, and team composition.

• Represent Android engineering in cross-functional and cross-org forums; influence platform, design-system, and API decisions made outside your team.

• Write and evangelize internal standards, playbooks, and documentation; run knowledge-sharing sessions and guild forums.

Product & Business Partnership

• Partner with Product to shape scope and sequencing — surface technical constraints early and propose cheaper paths to the same outcome.

• Define success metrics with Product (adoption, engagement, crash rate, task completion, SDK integration success rate) and drive iteration based on data.

• Assess feasibility and effort for new initiatives; provide credible estimates with explicit assumptions and risks.

• Implement and support compliance of self and team to Freshworks compliance and information security processes, including secure-coding practices, data-handling requirements, and privacy obligations.

Qualifications

Requirements / Must Have:

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 6+ years building and shipping production Android applications.

• 2+ years in a technical leadership role — tech lead, lead engineer, or equivalent — owning architecture and outcomes for a team of engineers.

• Expert-level Kotlin with strong Java interop; deep command of the Android SDK, framework internals, and the full debugging and profiling toolchain.

• Demonstrated ownership of a non-trivial Android architecture at scale, including multi-module Gradle structure and dependency management.

• Deep expertise in Coroutines and Flow, structured concurrency, threading, memory management, and diagnosis of leaks, race conditions, and deadlocks.

• Strong experience with Jetpack Compose and the Views toolkit, plus the Jetpack libraries (Lifecycle, Navigation, WorkManager, Paging).

• Proficiency in Clean Architecture, MVVM/MVI, SOLID, and DI frameworks (Dagger/Hilt).

• Strong experience with local persistence (Room, SQLite) including migrations, and networking (Retrofit, OkHttp) including interceptors, caching, and retry semantics.

• Proven track record diagnosing and eliminating ANRs, crashes, and performance regressions in production, across a fragmented device base.

• Ownership of mobile CI/CD end to end, signing and artifact publishing, and Play Console release operations including staged rollout decisions.

• Track record of driving measurable improvements in app stability, performance, or engineering velocity — with numbers you can speak to.

• Strong grounding in OOP, design patterns, data structures, and algorithms.

• Strong written communication: design docs, RFCs, and post-mortems that hold up to scrutiny.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor and level up engineers, and to build consensus across teams without formal authority.

• Extensive experience with Agile methodologies and strong working knowledge of the SDLC.

• Data-driven decision-making and comfort operating with ambiguity in a fast-paced environment.

Desired Skills (but not all required):

• Experience building and shipping a public or partner-facing SDK, including API design, versioning, and backward-compatibility management.

• Experience leading a Views → Compose migration in production.

• Kotlin Multiplatform, or experience with React Native / Flutter bridging and plugin authoring.

• Mobile security depth: Keystore, certificate pinning, encryption at rest, root/tamper detection, obfuscation strategy, OWASP MASVS familiarity.

• Experience maintaining a shared design system or internal library consumed by multiple apps.

• Experience with GraphQL on mobile, including caching and schema evolution.

• Experimentation platforms, feature flagging, and progressive delivery at scale.

• Familiarity with iOS/Swift sufficient to reason about parity and shared architecture decisions.

• Exposure to GoLang in mobile application development.

• B2B SaaS, multi-tenant, or enterprise mobility experience (MDM, SSO/SAML).

• Accessibility (TalkBack, dynamic font scaling) and internationalization at scale.

• Participation in developer communities or contributions to open-source projects.

Additional Information

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.