Freshworks: Senior Director, Engineering - AI Studio (CX & EX) — Chennai, TN, India

About Freshworks

Freshworks develops cloud-based software for customer and employee experiences. Its product range includes customer support, sales and marketing automation, chat and IT service management. The employer names Freshdesk, Freshsales, Freshmarketer, Freshservice and Freshchat, supported by shared platform services. These applications address different operational needs, from managing customer conversations and sales activity to helping employees obtain IT services. The business emphasises software designed for end users and straightforward implementation.

The position and its setting

Freshworks lists Senior Director, Engineering - AI Studio (CX & EX) in Chennai, TN, India, under reference REF8768C. The details below separate the work described by the employer from essential conditions, preferred experience and practical preparation advice.

• Employment type: Full-time
• Employer listing date: 3 September 2026
• Brands: Freshworks

Responsibilities and work described

• At Freshworks, we are building the future of customer and employee engagement - and AI agents are at the center of it
• The AI Agent Platform is the foundation on which our next generation of autonomous and assistive experiences are built
• AI Studio is the product surface that brings that platform to life: the place where builders design, test, deploy, observe, and continuously optimize AI agents that ship inside our CX and EX products
• A visionary engineering leader to own AI Studio end to end
• This is a pivotal, high-visibility role with the opportunity to shape how thousands of businesses build and operate AI agents - setting the bar for craftsmanship, developer experience, reliability, and scale
• Leadership: a dynamic, multi-disciplinary organization of engineers and engineering managers spanning front-end, BFF/services, and platform integration
• Own the vision and technical execution for AI Studio - the end-to-end experience to build, test, deploy, observe, and optimize AI agents on the AI Agent Platform
• Delivery: a best-in-class front end and a robust Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) layer that expose the AI Agent Platform’s capabilities to builders with speed, trust, and clarity
• Embed AI Studio natively within both CX and EX product lines, ensuring a seamless, consistent builder and end-user experience across surfaces
• Establishment: the agent lifecycle as a first-class product: authoring and configuration, testing and evaluation, safe deployment, live observability, and data-driven optimization
• Partner deeply with the AI Agent Platform, AI/ML, and Data Science teams to surface state-of-the-art models, tools, and orchestration capabilities through intuitive workflows
• Define and track impact: agent build velocity, time-to-deploy, adoption, agent quality and containment/deflection, reliability, and measurable ROI for CX and EX customers
• Establishment: governance and trust: access controls, guardrails, data classification, privacy/PII handling, auditability, and compliance-ready practices for agent workflows
• Set the AI Studio vision: Define the strategy, roadmap, and operating model for a unified studio experience that lets builders create, test, deploy, observe, and optimize AI agents across CX and EX
• Own the full builder journey: Ship the front-end and BFF that make agent authoring, configuration, and iteration fast, intuitive, and reliable - from first prototype to production at scale
• Delivery: testing & evaluation: Build the tooling for agent testing, simulation, and evaluation (quality, safety, regression) so teams ship agents with confidence and measurable quality bars

Essential requirements and candidate background

• What You’ll Bring
• A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 15+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, with a track record of at least 5 years in a senior leadership role (Director or above) leading product-facing platform, developer-tooling, or application engineering teams
• Demonstrable experience building, scaling, and leading high-performing product and engineering organizations in an enterprise SaaS environment
• Technical foundation in building and operating large-scale, distributed systems on public cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP), including modern front-end architectures and Backend-for-Frontend (BFF)/API design
• Hands-on understanding of the AI/agent landscape: LLMs, agent orchestration, RAG, evaluation and observability for AI systems, and the practical realities of shipping AI features into production
• Track record of delivering builder- or developer-facing products (studios, low-code/no-code tooling, or platform consoles) with UX and reliability at scale
• Skills Inventory:
• Leadership & Talent Management
• Inspirational leadership & mentorship
• Talent acquisition & retention
• Organizational design & scaling
• Performance management & career development
• Technical & Architectural Acumen
• Front-end architecture & Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) design
• Cloud computing, microservices & large-scale distributed systems
• AI agent platforms: LLMs, orchestration, evaluation & AI observability
• DevOps, CI/CD, and SRE principles
• Data security, guardrails & compliance frameworks
• Strategic & Business Acumen

Location, schedule and contract conditions

• Please note this is a hybrid role that requires an in-office presence 3 days / week (Tue-Thu)
• Work arrangement: On-site
• Advertised location: Chennai, TN, India

Conditions requiring the complete notice

Some passages contain complex or combined conditions that have not been reduced to short eligibility statements here. Read the complete linked notice for those passages, including any alternatives, exceptions or restrictions. The concise facts above should not be treated as the full wording of every condition.

Pay and application dates

A verified salary figure is not established in this article. An online estimate for another Senior Director, Engineering - AI Studio (CX & EX) vacancy is not an offer for reference REF8768C; use the employer’s own pay disclosure and recruitment communication.

A closing date is not confirmed in this article. Check the current employer page before submitting: an undated posting can change or be withdrawn.

How to apply to Freshworks

Applications follow the official employer page linked below.

Open the official Freshworks posting below and match the title and reference REF8768C.

Compare your qualifications and experience with the essential conditions for the Chennai, TN, India position, then read the preferred criteria separately.

Prepare an accurate CV and the supporting items requested in that employer’s application. Provide only information and documents you are authorised to share.

Use the employer’s application option, complete the required fields and review the submission. Retain the acknowledgement when one is provided. Job Alerts World does not receive the application.

Practical preparation: CI/CD

CI/CD experience should describe the path from a proposed change to a release. Identify the checks, build artefacts and deployment steps you worked on, together with the problem the pipeline solved.

Relevant skills

• CI/CD
• AWS
• GCP
• Azure
• APIs
• AI/ML
• LLMs
• AI
• audit
• compliance
• partnership development
• Google Cloud