Staff Engineer - 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 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,…