Staff Engineer - Backend

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/) ### About the Role We are looking for a **Staff Engineer – Backend** to help design, build, and evolve the systems powering HighLevel’s CRM platform. This is a senior individual contributor role for an engineer who can solve complex backend and distributed systems problems, influence architecture across teams, and raise the engineering bar across the organization. You will work on systems handling high-volume APIs, asynchronous processing, large datasets, search and indexing, event-driven workflows, and business-critical operations at scale. This role requires someone who can move comfortably between architecture and implementation. You should be able to investigate a production bottleneck, design a scalable solution, challenge existing architectural assumptions, and work hands-on with engineers to take that solution to production. ### What You ll Do - Design and evolve highly scalable, reliable backend systems and services - Lead architecture for complex and cross-team backend initiatives - Design APIs, data models, event-driven workflows, and service boundaries - Build systems capable of handling high-throughput requests and large-scale datasets - Design asynchronous processing using queues, events, streams, and background workers - Make architectural decisions around relational databases, NoSQL databases, search systems, caching, and messaging infrastructure - Identify performance bottlenecks across applications, databases, queues, and infrastructure - Improve API latency, throughput, resource utilization, and system scalability - Design systems for graceful degradation, retries, idempotency, failure recovery, and fault tolerance - Establish patterns for data consistency and distributed workflows across services - Lead database and data-access optimization initiatives - Design effective caching, indexing, partitioning, sharding, and data-retention strategies - Improve observability through metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, and actionable alerts - Lead investigations into complex production incidents and drive permanent corrective actions - Define engineering standards around reliability, scalability, testing, security, and maintainability - Review architecture proposals and critical code changes across teams - Identify systemic technical debt and drive pragmatic modernization initiatives - Partner with Product and Engineering leadership to make technical trade-offs based on business requirements - Mentor senior engineers and develop stronger technical ownership across teams - Remain hands-on and contribute code to critical systems and initiatives ### Minimum Qualifications - **8+ years of software engineering experience**, with significant experience building backend systems at scale - Strong proficiency in at least one backend language such as **Node.js/TypeScript, Go, Java, or similar** - Strong understanding of distributed systems and microservice architecture - Deep understanding of API design and service-to-service communication - Strong knowledge of relational and NoSQL database systems - Experience designing systems involving large datasets and high request volumes - Strong understanding of concurrency, asynchronous processing, queues, and event-driven architectures - Experience with caching and distributed caching strategies - Strong understanding of database indexing, query optimization, transactions, and data consistency - Experience designing reliable systems with retries, idempotency, timeouts, rate limiting, and failure recovery - Strong understanding of scalability, availability, consistency, and performance trade-offs - Experience diagnosing complex production issues using metrics, logs, and distributed tracing - Strong system design and architectural decision-making skills - Demonstrated ability to lead technically complex initiatives involving multiple engineers or teamsPreferred Qualifications - Strong experience with **Node.js / TypeScript and Go** - Experience operating distributed systems at significant scale - Experience with **Elasticsearch / OpenSearch** - Experience with **PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Firestore, or similar** **databases** - Experience with **Kafka, Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar messaging** **systems** - Experience with **Redis** and distributed caching - Experience designing search, indexing, aggregation, and reporting systems - Experience with high-volume event processing and data pipelines - Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure - Experience with AWS, GCP, or similar cloud platforms - Experience with observability platforms such as Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, or similar tooling - Experience designing multi-tenant SaaS platforms - Experience with CRM, workflow automation, task management, messaging, or similar products - Experience performing large-scale data migrations without significant customer Impact Tech Stack **Backend:** Node.js, TypeScript, Go **Databases & Search:** MySQL, MongoDB, Firestore, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch **Caching:** Redis **Messaging & Events:** Kafka, Pub/Sub **Architecture:** Microservices, REST APIs, Event-Driven Systems **Infrastructure:** Kubernetes, GCP **Observability:** Metrics, Logs, Distributed Tracing and Alerting ### What Success Looks Like A successful Staff Engineer: - Designs systems that remain reliable as traffic and data volume grow significantly - Solves architectural problems that affect multiple services and engineering teams - Identifies scalability and reliability risks before they become production incidents - Improves latency, throughput, availability, and infrastructure efficiency - Makes strong technical decisions around data storage, caching, messaging, and service architecture - Simplifies complex systems rather than introducing unnecessary abstractions - Creates reusable architectural patterns that improve engineering velocity across teams - Leads ambiguous technical initiatives from problem definition through production - Raises the quality of system design and technical decision-making across the organization - Improves operational excellence through better observability, incident prevention, and failure recovery - Mentors engineers to independently solve increasingly complex systems problems - Remains hands-on and capable of going deep into production systems when required ### What We Look For We are looking for engineers who think about systems beyond the happy path. **A Staff Engineer should naturally ask:** - What happens when this system handles 10x the current traffic? - What happens when a dependency becomes slow or unavailable? - How does this behave when millions of events arrive within a short period? - What are our consistency guarantees, and where can we tolerate eventual consistency? - How do we prevent duplicate processing and make operations idempotent? - Is the database the bottleneck, or are we solving the problem at the wrong layer? - Should this data live in a transactional database, search engine, cache, or event stream? - How do we migrate this architecture without disrupting existing customers? - How will we observe this system in production and know when it is degrading? - Can we solve this once at the platform level instead of every team solving it independently The Staff Engineer role is not defined by writing the most code. It is defined by identifying the highest-leverage technical problems, making strong architectural decisions, solving the hardest parts, and enabling engineering teams to build reliable systems faster. ### Why Join Us - Build backend systems operating at significant global scale - Solve challenging distributed systems and data architecture problems - Influence architecture across multiple products and engineering teams - Work with high-volume APIs, event streams, databases, search systems, and distributed infrastructure - Drive improvements in scalability, reliability, performance, and engineering efficiency - Remain deeply technical without moving into people management - Work in a fast-moving engineering environment with significant autonomy and Ownership