Job Description

Overview of the role:

As a Lead iOS Engineer at Freshworks, you own the technical direction of one or more flagship mobile applications serving millions of users. You set the architectural standard, make the build-vs-buy and native-vs-cross-platform calls, and are accountable for the quality, performance, and release health of your surface area. You lead a team of iOS and cross-platform engineers — through design reviews, mentorship, and hands-on pairing rather than through hierarchy — and you partner directly with Product, Design, Backend, and QA leadership to shape the roadmap, not just 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.

Responsibilities:

Technical leadership & architecture

- Own and evolve the mobile architecture across the app portfolio — modularization, dependency boundaries, state management, navigation, and offline/sync strategy.

- Make and document consequential technical decisions (native Swift vs Flutter/React Native, third-party SDK adoption, persistence and caching strategy) with clear trade-off analysis and a migration path.

- Author and drive technical design documents; run design reviews and hold the bar on SOLID, clean architecture, and pattern consistency (MVVM, VIPER, Coordinator, unidirectional data flow).

- Lead large-scale refactors and platform migrations (e.g. UIKit → SwiftUI, monolith → modular packages) with incremental, low-risk rollout plans.

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

Delivery & execution

- Break down ambiguous,



multi-quarter product 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, phased rollouts, App Store submission and review escalations, kill switches, and rollback procedures.

- Own build and developer productivity: build times, flaky test elimination, local dev setup, and CI/CD reliability (Fastlane, GitHub Actions).

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

Quality, performance & reliability

- Define and enforce the quality bar: test strategy across unit, integration, snapshot, and UI layers; code coverage expectations; and mandatory quality gates in CI.

- Own crash-free-session rate, ANR/hang rate, cold-start and frame-rate budgets, app size, and battery/network efficiency for your surface area; set targets and report against them.

- Instrument and profile with Instruments, MetricKit, and Xcode Organizer; lead performance investigations that cross app, SDK, and backend boundaries.

- 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 (Crashlytics/Sentry, Firebase Remote Config).

People & 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 mobile: 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 mobile 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) and drive iteration based on data.

- Assess feasibility and effort for current 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/App Store policy obligations.

📌 Lead Software Engineer - Mobile (Chennai)
🏢 FreshWorks
📍 Chennai