Remote Principal Architect, Distributed Systems

Openkrill; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

HighLevel is hiring a senior architect to oversee the health of a billion-scale distributed system. You will own cross-service architecture, identify systemic risks, and guide the evolution of the platform across Workflows, Conversations, and Ticketing.

This role emphasizes resilience, scalable design, and collaborative problem-solving across multiple teams. You will prototype architectural bets, drive post-incident learnings, and ensure safe, scalable deployments in a remote-first environment

Qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience with deep ownership of large-scale distributed systems.
• Sole accountability for a production system through real failures.
• Deep command of queueing, async architectures, ordering, and idempotency.
• Strong SQL/NoSQL storage reasoning and indexing at scale.
• Professional level in Redis or similar in-memory systems.
• Production Kubernetes experience at scale and autoscaling behavior.
• Exceptional design communication, docs, and RCAs that guide multiple teams.
• Fluent in Node.js and/or Go; capable of prototyping proposals and shipping fixes on the critical path.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture health of a billion-scale distributed system and its failure modes.
• Approve critical-path designs and lead architectural decisions across teams.
• Hunt gaps, single points of failure, and drive fixes before incidents.
• Prototype risky architectural bets; ship remediation after incidents; pair on hard bugs.
• Make resilience a system property with backpressure and isolation boundaries.
• Lead design reviews, post-mortems and patterns adopted by 80+ engineers.
• Set standards for AI-assisted engineering on critical systems; ensure safe merges.

Skills

Distributed systems ownership

Node.js

Go

Kubernetes

Design docs & RCAs

System architecture

Production reliability

Cloud experience (GCP)

Leadership & mentoring

Tools

Redis

MongoDB

Firestore

ClickHouse

ElasticSearch

GCP Pub/Sub

Cloud Tasks

Kubernetes

Job description

HighLevel is hiring a senior architect to oversee the health of a billion-scale distributed system. You will own cross-service architecture, identify systemic risks, and guide the evolution of the platform across Workflows, Conversations, and Ticketing.

This role emphasizes resilience, scalable design, and collaborative problem-solving across multiple teams. You will prototype architectural bets, drive post-incident learnings, and ensure safe, scalable deployments in a remote-first environment