Staff Backend Engineer: Scale, Architecture, & Impact

HighLevel; Texas; Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

HighLevel is seeking a Staff Engineer - Backend to design, build, and evolve the systems powering our CRM platform. This senior IC role requires moving between architecture and implementation, solving bottlenecks, and delivering scalable, reliable services.

You will influence architecture across teams, lead complex backend initiatives, and mentor engineers while remaining hands-on with critical systems to production.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with backend systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in one or more backend languages (Node.js/TypeScript, Go, Java).
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems and microservice architecture.
• API design and service-to-service communication expertise.
• Relational and NoSQL databases, including indexing and transactions.
• Experience with caching, queues, and event-driven architectures.
• Ability to lead technically complex initiatives and teams.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve highly scalable backend systems and services.
• Lead architecture for cross-team backend initiatives.
• Design APIs, data models, event-driven workflows, and boundaries.
• Build systems for high-throughput requests and large datasets.
• Implement asynchronous processing with queues, events, streams, workers.
• Make decisions on databases, search, caching, and messaging infra.
• Identify bottlenecks and improve latency, throughput, and scalability.
• Design for retries, idempotency, fault tolerance, and recovery.
• Establish patterns for data consistency and distributed workflows.
• Lead data-access optimization and caching/indexing strategies.
• Enhance observability with metrics, logs, tracing, and dashboards.
• Lead incidents investigations and drive permanent fixes.
• Define reliability, security, and maintainability standards.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

API design

Node.js/TypeScript

Go

Java

Databases

Caching

Event-driven

Observability

Mentorship

Code contribution

Tools

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

PostgreSQL

MySQL

MongoDB

Firestore

Kafka

Pub/Sub

RabbitMQ

Redis

Kubernetes

AWS

GCP

Job description

HighLevel is seeking a Staff Engineer - Backend to design, build, and evolve the systems powering our CRM platform. This senior IC role requires moving between architecture and implementation, solving bottlenecks, and delivering scalable, reliable services.

You will influence architecture across teams, lead complex backend initiatives, and mentor engineers while remaining hands-on with critical systems to production.