Lead Engineer - Platform (Special Projects)

Job description

**About HighLevel:**HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that gives agencies, entrepreneurs and SMBs the infrastructure to build, automate and scale. Today, HighLevel supports SMBs across 150+ countries, fueling community-driven growth rooted in real customer outcomes. To date, businesses operating on HighLevel have generated over $7 billion in ecosystem value, demonstrating the impact of shared infrastructure at scale. By centralizing conversations, automation and intelligence into one system, we help businesses move faster, reduce complexity and execute efficiently. Behind the platform, HighLevel powers more than 4 billion API hits and 2.5 billion message events daily. With 250 terabytes of distributed data, 250+ microservices and over 1 million domain names supported, our architecture is built for performance, resilience and long-term scalability. ****Our People:**** With over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries, HighLevel operates as a global, remote-first organization built for speed and ownership. We value initiative, clarity and execution, creating space for ambitious people to build systems that support millions of businesses worldwide. Here, innovation thrives, ideas are celebrated and people come first, no matter where they call home. ****Our Impact:**** Every month, HighLevel enables more than 1.5 billion messages, 200 million leads and 20 million conversations for the more than 1 million businesses we support. Behind those numbers are real people building independence, expanding opportunity and creating measurable impact. We’re proud to be a part of that. Learn more about us on our [YouTube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXFiV4qDX5ipE-DQcsm1j4g) or [Blog Posts](https://blog.gohighlevel.com/general-atlantic-joins-highlevel/) ### What You'll Do - Lead the architecture and delivery of industry solutions, from understanding the customer problem with product and domain experts, through early experiments and validation, to production launch at scale - Make pragmatic speed vs. scale trade-offs: ship lean versions to validate with customers, then harden what works into reusable platform capabilities - Design a reusable "industry layer": configurable objects, workflows, templates, and automations that can be packaged per vertical without forking the core product - Build integrations with industry platforms such as food delivery services (Uber Eats, DoorDash), payment providers (Stripe), and booking and ticketing systems - Define standards for how industry features are versioned, rolled out behind feature flags, and rolled back across thousands of accounts and sub-accounts - Build reliable event-driven systems for real-time industry workflows such as orders, reservations, check-ins, and payments - Collaborate with core platform teams to expose safe, well-documented extension points that industry solutions depend on - Lead and mentor a team of engineers, working day to day with product and design, through technical direction, code reviews, and a strong focus on quality and reliability - Drive observability, performance, and error handling across industry workflows and integrations - Work with product and go-to-market teams to identify the highest-impact opportunities in each vertical, and measure success by customer adoption and time-to-value ### What We're Looking For - 7+ years of backend or platform engineering experience, with 2+ years in a technical leadership role - Deep experience designing configurable, multi-tenant platforms: metadata-driven data models, workflow engines, or templating systems - A track record of taking products or major features from 0→1 into production, including knowing when to move fast and when to invest in scale - A track record of entering unfamiliar domains, learning them quickly from experts, and translating that into solid technical designs - Strong product and customer sense: you connect technical decisions to business outcomes, not just system design - Experience building third-party integrations, including OAuth flows, signed webhooks, data sync, and error recovery - Strong understanding of security, scalability, and data isolation in multi-tenant SaaS environments - Excellent communication skills with both engineers and non-technical domain stakeholders ### Bonus Points - Experience with vertical SaaS or industry clouds, such as Salesforce Industries, Toast, or Eventbrite - Hands-on work with food delivery, POS, reservation, or event ticketing integrations - Experience with payment flows such as Stripe Connect, deposits, and refunds - Familiarity with scoped permissions, event hooks, and audit trails - Experience packaging features as installable apps or templates for customers and partners ### Our Tech Stack - **Backend:** TypeScript on Node.js with NestJS, building REST APIs documented with OpenAPI/Swagger - **Frontend:** Vue 3, TypeScript, Pinia and Tailwind, shipped as module-federated micro-frontends - **Data and messaging:** Firestore (including MongoDB-compatible mode via Mongoose), Elasticsearch and Redis, with event-driven workers on Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud Tasks - **Cloud and delivery:** Google Cloud Platform, Docker and Kubernetes (GKE) with Istio, and CI/CD on Jenkins and GitHub Actions - **Observability and quality:** Prometheus, Cloud Logging and Sentry, and testing with Jest, Vitest and Playwright