Engineering Manager II - Platform Backend

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 or Blog Posts.

About the Role:

We're looking for an experienced Engineering Manager II to lead engineering for our Platform Services team - the team responsible for the shared infrastructure, internal tooling, and core services that other product teams build on. This is not a purely managerial role; you'll stay hands-on with architecture, code, and systems while owning team outcomes, delivery, and platform reliability at enterprise scale.

Responsibilities:

• Architecture & Scale: Own and evolve distributed systems architecture for platform services, ensuring they're reliable, extensible, and performant under enterprise-scale load.
• Cost & Efficiency: Drive continuous cost optimization initiatives across cloud infrastructure without compromising reliability or performance - with measurable, sustained impact.
• Execution & Delivery: Own roadmap planning, estimation, and predictable delivery for the platform team, balancing tech debt, new capabilities, and operational stability.
• Reliability & Operations: Establish strong observability and incident management practices; ensure the team can detect, diagnose, and resolve issues quickly, and drive blameless postmortems that lead to real fixes.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Use metrics and data to prioritize, evaluate trade-offs, and report on platform health, cost, and team performance.
• People & Culture: Hire, mentor, and grow engineers; set technical standards; build a culture of ownership and craftsmanship within the team.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with product engineering teams, SRE/infra, security, and leadership to align platform capabilities with organizational needs.
• Communication: Represent the platform team's priorities, risks, and progress clearly to engineering leadership and stakeholders across the org.

Requirements:

• 10+ years of overall software engineering experience, including at least 2+ years in a Software Development Manager (or equivalent) role.
• Expert-level proficiency in either Go, Python or Nodejs.
• Prior experience managing a platform team, or having worked as an individual contributor on platform teams for at least 3+ years, at enterprise scale.
• Strong hands-on orientation - comfortable reviewing code, debugging production issues, and going deep on architecture, not just managing processes. Candidates in a purely managerial (non-hands-on) role for the last 1+ year will not be considered a fit.
• Deep, practical experience with GCP and/or AWS service management - provisioning, scaling, IAM, networking, and cost governance.
• Demonstrated track record of driving cost optimization initiatives in an enterprise cloud environment, with measurable results.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems architecture - consistency, availability, fault tolerance, scaling patterns, and trade-offs at scale.
• Strong observability fundamentals - hands-on experience with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch, or equivalent, and a track record of building observability into systems from the ground up.
• A data-driven approach to decision-making, prioritization, and performance reporting.
• Proven experience in roadmap planning, estimation, and delivering complex initiatives on time.
• Strong people management skills - hiring, mentoring, performance management - combined with the ability to…