About Us:
HighLevel is an AI powered, all-in-one white-label sales & marketing platform that empowers agencies, entrepreneurs, and businesses to elevate their digital presence and drive growth. We are proud to support a global and growing community of over 2 million businesses, comprised of agencies, consultants, and businesses of all sizes and industries. HighLevel empowers users with all the tools needed to capture, nurture, and close new leads into repeat customers. As of mid 2025, HighLevel processes over 15 billion API hits and handles more than 2.5 billion message events every day. Our platform manages over 470 terabytes of data distributed across five databases, operates with a network of over 250 microservices, and supports over 1 million domain names.
Our People
With over 1,500 team members across 15+ countries, we operate in a global, remote-first environment. We are building more than software; we are building a global community rooted in creativity, collaboration, and impact. We take pride in cultivating a culture where innovation thrives, ideas are celebrated, and people come first, no matter where they call home.
Our Impact
As of mid 2025, our platform powers over 1.5 billion messages, helps generate over 200 million leads, and facilitates over 20 million conversations for the more than 2 million businesses we serve each month. Behind those numbers are real people growing their companies, connecting with customers, and making their mark - and we get to help make that happen.
About The Role
We're building a global commerce platform to power
$1T+ in annual transactions for millions of SMEs. Our SDE V (Staff) is the technical forcemultiplier who
sets the architecture ,
raises the reliability bar , and
multiplies team effectiveness . You'll steward our core payments models
subscriptions, payments , reconciliation , tax and the services around them, ensuring
correctness by design, auditability, and delightful performance at scale . This is an
IC role with orglevel influence (no direct reports), focused on designing systems, shaping standards, and growing engineers.
Stack:Backend: Go, ConnectRPC, Buf
Frontend: Vue.js , Vite, Webpack MFA, TanStack Query
Databases: MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse
Cloud: GCP (GKE), Pub/Sub, Redis, OpenTelemetry
What You'll Do
- Architect and ship multitenant, planetscale services (checkout, subscriptions, payments orchestration, invoicing, tax hooks) with clear domain boundaries (DDD) and hard SLOs.
- Be the custodian of API & schema design: own protobuf/ConnectRPC conventions, versioning policy, deprecation playbooks, and Buf breakingchange checksso our contracts stand the test of time.
- Guarantee resilience & availability of core payment paths: timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, idempotency keys, outbox/Saga patterns, hedged requests, and graceful degradation.
- Ensure complete auditability: appendonly doubleentry ledger, immutable event streams, tracelinked entities (OTel trace/span IDs), tamperevident trails, and reconciliations that tie out to the cent.
- Own error boundaries endtoend: enumerate failure domains (PSP, network, data, concurrency, quota, browser, device); design uniform error contracts; implement compensations/backfills and automated replay.
- Keep track of every deployed thing: services, workers, triggers, cron, subscriptionsown the service catalog and scorecards (owners, SLOs, runbooks, PDBs, HPA/VPA, budgets, quotas, timeouts).
- Configuration & limits stewardship: enforce sane defaults across GKE, Pub/Sub, Redis, Firestore/Mongo, ClickHouseconnection pools, ack deadlines, batch sizes, TTLs, memory/FD limits, and GCP quotas.
- Observability as a product: pervasive OpenTelemetry, RED/USE metrics, exemplars, trace sampling, SLO dashboards, and alerting that wakes humans only for userimpacting issues.
- Production excellence: canary/bluegreen rollouts, automated rollbacks, chaos drills, DR playbooks (RPO/RTO), multiregion failover strategies, and incident command on rotation.
- Security & compliance by design: PCI scope minimization, tokenization/vaulting, secrets/KMS hygiene, data retention/archival, and privacy controlsembed checks in CI/CD.
- Developer acceleration: pave golden paths (service templates, ADR/RFC process, linting/formatting, contract tests, ephemeral envs, load/perf harnesses) to make the right thing the easy thing
What You'll Lead
- Core domain evolution: orchestration ledger reconciliation flows with crisp invariants and consistency guarantees (readyourwrites where needed, eventual where appropriate).
- Reliability strategy: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, cost/FinOps guardrails, multiregion posture, and DR exercises.
- API & data governance: canonical models, schema lifecycle (compatibility matrix, migrations), data lifecycle (retention, archival, compliance).
- Practice leadership for HighLevel: design reviews, postmortems, technical strategy, coding standards, and mentorship across teamsraise the bar for the org.
- Hiring & team growth: help us hire, scale, and train the right team; shape interview loops, rubrics, onboarding, and ongoing learning (brown bags, reviews, pair design).
- Crossfunctional partnership: collaborate with Product/Marketing/Support to translate platform capabilities and constraints into roadmaps, GTM narratives, and reliable customer outcomes.
- Risk & roadmap: maintain a technical risk register, make buildvsbuy calls, and propose simplifications or deprecations that meaningfully reduce complexity and MTTR.
Minimum Qualifications
- 10+ years building and operating backend systems (at least 5+ years in Go), with 23+ years acting as a Staff/Principallevel IC or Tech Lead for critical paths.
- Deep proficiency with protobuf + ConnectRPC/gRPC and API lifecycle management (versioning, compatibility, contract testing, Buf).
- Distributed systems fundamentals: idempotency, exactlyonceish via dedupe/outbox, ordering, consensus basics, backpressure, concurrency control.
- Eventdriven architectures on GCP (Pub/Sub), plus Redis for fast paths; strong schema design in MongoDB/Firestore and analytics/reporting patterns on ClickHouse.
- Kubernetes/GKE operations at scale: autoscaling (HPA/VPA), PDBs, resource limits/requests, multiregion topologies, CI/CD, canary/bluegreen.
- Reliability engineering: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity & load testing, incident management, DR/BCP.
- Security & compliance: secrets/KMS best practices, PCI basics (scope reduction, key rotation), and data governance (retention/archival).
- Testing discipline: unit, integration, contract, propertybased, performance; test data management and deterministic environments.
- Frontend collaboration: solid understanding of Vue.js + TanStack Query to shape clean API surfaces and performance budgets across the boundary.
- Exceptional technical writing & communication: design docs, ADRs/RFCs, postmortems, and stakeholder updates.
Nice to have
- Handson integrations with major PSPs/local rails (e.g., UPI, wallets, BNPL, cards/3DS2) and reconciliation at scale.
- Experience with activeactive or multiregion designs; chaos engineering; traffic management.
- Observability leadership with OpenTelemetry at org scale (tailbased sampling, exemplars).
- FinOps experience: cost baselining, quotas, budget alarms, and workload rightsizing.
- Familiarity with regulatory frameworks (PCI DSS, SOC 2/ISO 27001) and privacy laws relevant to our markets.
How We Work
- Pragmatic architecture with a bias to ship, measure, iterate.
- High ownership, low ego: design docs, incident reviews, datadriven decisions.
- Productfirst mindset: we sweat the merchant and buyer experience.
- IC leadership: influence through design, docs, prototypes, and mentorshipnot headcount.
EEO Statement:
The company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. As an employer subject to affirmative action regulations, we invite you to voluntarily provide the following demographic information. This information is used solely for compliance with government record keeping, reporting, and other legal requirements. Providing this information is voluntary and refusal to do so will not affect your application status. This data will be kept separate from your application and will not be used in the hiring decision.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
