Staff Engineer - Backend

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

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.

Responsibilities:

• 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.

Requirements:

• 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 teams.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strong experience with Node.js / TypeScript and Go.
• Experience operating distributed systems at a 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 and Search: MySQL, MongoDB, Firestore, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
• Caching: Redis.
• Messaging and Events: Kafka, Pub/Sub.
• Architecture: Microservices, REST APIs, Event-Driven Systems.
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, GCP.
• Observability: Metrics, Logs, Distributed Tracing, and Alerting.