Sr. SDE (Email)

Job description

**About us** 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/) **About the Team:** The Email team owns the Email platform behind HighLevel's email experience, which powers 40M+ emails a day. We own the full path from compose to inbox, so the reliability, speed and quality of what we ship directly decide whether emails from over a million businesses land in the inbox. We are responsible for: - Email Platform: The Vue.js apps used to design, compose and send emails, plus the Node.js/NestJS services behind them. - Sending Infrastructure & Deliverability: IP pools, dedicated IPs, dedicated domains and shared domain pools. These let new users send from day one, while we stay accountable for getting their email into the inbox. - API-First Platform: Every capability is exposed through APIs, so email can be built into any product or workflow that needs it. - Scale & Reliability: Keeping throughput high at peak load, with high uptime and send success rates. - Email Statistics & Analytics: Integrating email stats with internal teams and making every release measurable on our dashboards. - AI in Email: Bringing LLM-powered capabilities into email creation, while weighing token cost, latency and quality **Impact & Scale** Email is one of the most critical channels on HighLevel. When it works, businesses grow; when it breaks, their customers stop hearing from them. That's the weight this role carries. - Businesses: Every one of the 1M+ businesses on HighLevel relies on email to reach their customers. - Sub-accounts: Your work runs across 1.6M+ sub-accounts, from solo operators to agencies managing hundreds of clients. - End users: What you ship reaches end users through 1.2B+ emails every month. - Volume: 40M+ emails a day flow through the systems you'll own, so a 1% gain in reliability or deliverability affects hundreds of thousands of emails daily. - Blast radius: One change can affect every business on the platform at once, which is why we care so much about reliability, data integrity and security. **How we work** - Iterate fast: Go from idea to prototype to production in days, not quarters. Ship small, measure, learn and improve. - Use AI well: Use AI across the whole cycle (design, coding, testing, reviews and debugging) to move faster without lowering the quality bar, and pick the right model for each job based on quality, latency and cost. **About the Role:** The traditional model of siloed product managers, designers and engineers is too slow for AI-native development. At HighLevel, every engineer owns a product outcome end to end, from idea to prototype to production to scale. You will operate as a Team of One. With AI tooling and strong engineering infrastructure, one engineer can now build what used to take a whole squad. You won't be implementing tickets. You'll own the product. ### Responsibilities **Feature & Module Ownership** - Translate business goals into working, deployable systems. - Propose architecture, data models, workflows and implementation plans for your modules, then refine them with Tech Leads and Engineering Managers before you build. - Own modules end to end: design, release, post-launch stability and ongoing improvements. - Design clean, versioned, well-documented APIs as a core part of every feature, so the platform can be integrated wherever it's needed. **Rapid Prototyping & Iteration** - Turn ambiguous ideas into working demos quickly, using AI to build and iterate fast. - Validate through experiments and real user feedback, then iterate to production quality. - Drive feature attribution and metrics visibility so every release is measurable. **Scale, Performance & Reliability** - Build and maintain the Email ecosystem, designing for scalability, reliability and data integrity at 40M+ emails/day. - Evolve our sending infrastructure, including IP pool management, dedicated IPs and domains, and shared domain pools, to protect sender reputation and maximize inbox placement. - Build robust error handling: idempotent processing, retries with backoff and graceful degradation. - Optimize frontend rendering, component architecture, lazy loading and state management. Tune backend queries, caching (Redis/CDN) and latency at scale. - Design data models and analytics on ClickHouse, MongoDB and Firestore. - Reason through token consumption, inference cost and infrastructure tradeoffs when integrating AI and LLMs. **Engineering Quality & Security** - Practice test-driven development and hold a high bar for automated test coverage. - Build securely by default: authentication, secrets management and safe handling of customer data and PII. **Operational Excellence** - Instrument systems with monitoring and telemetry. - Build evaluation loops for continuous quality improvement. - Automate workflows that increase engineering velocity. - Keep documentation clear and repeatable. ### Requirements - **4+ years** building and running production systems, including owning them when they broke: the on-call, the incident and the fix. - **Node.js (TypeScript) at scale:** You've shipped and operated high-throughput backends (queues, workers, retries, millions of events a day) and built real product UIs in **Vue.js** (or React). - **Systems that grew:** You've designed or re-architected a system for 10x growth and can explain the tradeoffs you made in queues, caching, partitioning and storage. - **Data you can trust:** You've built pipelines where losing or duplicating a record wasn't acceptable, using idempotency, deduplication, reconciliation and error handling that fails loudly, not quietly. - **Data modelling & analytics:** You've modelled data for transactional and analytical workloads, and made queries fast over billions of rows in ClickHouse (or BigQuery, Snowflake or similar). - **Cloud in production:** You've run services on GCP orAWS (Kubernetes, Pub/Sub or SQS, managed databases, IAM). - **Quality & security by habit:** You write tests first or alongside code (TDD), and treat auth, secrets, PII and abuse prevention as part of the design, not a review step. - **AI in the product:** You've shipped at least one AI or LLM-powered feature to real users and can walk through the model choice, prompts, evals, cost and latency. - **AI in your workflow:** You use AI coding tools every day, go from idea to working prototype in hours or days, and still own and stand behind every line that ships. - **Problem solving & ownership:** You take vague problems, break them down and get to a working answer without waiting for a ticket. ### Bonus Points - Experience with Go (Golang). - Experience in the email domain: email rendering, templates, SMTP/ESPs, or deliverability (IP warm-up, sender reputation, SPF/DKIM/DMARC). - Experience with data pipelines, analytics or telemetry. - Strong UX and front-end sensibility. - A portfolio or GitHub showing deployed systems.