Staff Engineer - Backend

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

Job summary

HighLevel is seeking a Staff Engineer – Backend to design, build, and evolve systems powering the CRM platform. This senior IC role demands solving complex backend and distributed systems problems, influencing architecture across teams, and raising the engineering bar across the organization.

You will tackle high-volume APIs, asynchronous processing, large datasets, search, indexing, and event-driven workflows at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience building backend systems at scale.
• Strong proficiency in Node.js/TypeScript, Go, Java or similar.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and microservice architecture.
• Experience with large datasets and high request volumes.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve scalable backend systems and services.
• Lead architecture for cross-team backend initiatives.
• Design APIs, data models, event-driven workflows, and service boundaries.
• Build systems for high-throughput requests and large datasets.
• Improve API latency, throughput, and system scalability.
• Mentor senior engineers and develop stronger technical ownership.

Skills

Backend systems design

Distributed architectures

API design

Performance optimization

Leadership

Mentoring

Hands-on coding

Cloud & Kubernetes

Tools

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

PostgreSQL

MySQL

MongoDB

Firestore

Redis

Kafka

Pub/Sub

RabbitMQ

SQS

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

Grafana/Prometheus

Job description

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, andbackground workers

• Make architectural decisions around relational databases, NoSQL databases,search systems, caching, and messaging infrastructure

• Identify performance bottlenecks across applications, databases, queues, andinfrastructure

• 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‑retentionstrategies

• Improve observability through metrics, logs, tracing, dashboards, and actionablealerts

• Lead investigations into complex production incidents and drive permanentcorrective actions

• Define engineering standards around reliability, scalability, testing, security, andmaintainability

• 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‑offsbased 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 experiencebuilding 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, andevent-driven architectures

• Experience with caching and distributed caching strategies

• Strong understanding of database indexing, query optimization, transactions, anddata consistency

• Experience designing reliable systems with retries, idempotency, timeouts, ratelimiting, and failure recovery

• Strong understanding of scalability, availability, consistency, and performancetrade-offs

• Experience diagnosing complex production issues using metrics, logs, anddistributed tracing

• Strong system design and architectural decision‑making skills

• Demonstrated ability to lead technically complex initiatives involving multipleengineers or teamsPreferred Qualifications

• Strong experience with Node.js / TypeScript and Go

• Experience operating distributed systems at 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, orsimilar products

• Experience performing large‑scale data migrations without significant customerImpact

Tech Stack

Backend: Node.js, TypeScript, Go

Databases & Search: MySQL, MongoDB, Firestore, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

Caching: Redis

Messaging & Events: Kafka, Pub/Sub

Architecture: Microservices, REST APIs, Event-Driven Systems

Infrastructure: Kubernetes, GCP

Observability: Metrics, Logs, Distributed Tracing and Alerting

What Success Looks Like

• Designs systems that remain reliable as traffic and data volume grow significantly
• Solves architectural problems that affect multiple services and engineering teams
• Identifies scalability and reliability risks before they become production incidents
• Improves latency, throughput, availability, and infrastructure efficiency
• Makes strong technical decisions around data storage, caching, messaging, andservice architecture
• Simplifies complex systems rather than introducing unnecessary abstractions
• Creates reusable architectural patterns that improve engineering velocity across teams
• Leads ambiguous technical initiatives from problem definition through production
• Raises the quality of system design and technical decision‑making across theorganization
• Improves operational excellence through better observability, incident prevention,and failure recovery
• Mentors engineers to independently solve increasingly complex systemsproblems
• Remains hands‑on and capable of going deep into production systems whenrequired

What We Look For

We are looking for engineers who think about systems beyond the happy path.

A Staff Engineer should naturally ask:

• What happens when this system handles 10x the current traffic?
• What happens when a dependency becomes slow or unavailable?
• How does this behave when millions of events arrive within a short period?
• What are our consistency guarantees, and where can we tolerate eventualconsistency?
• How do we prevent duplicate processing and make operations idempotent?
• Is the database the bottleneck, or are we solving the problem at the wrong layer?
• Should this data live in a transactional database, search engine, cache, or eventstream?
• How do we migrate this architecture without disrupting existing customers?
• How will we observe this system in production and know when it is degrading?
• Can we solve this once at the platform level instead of every team solving it independently

The Staff Engineer role is not defined by writing the most code. It is defined byidentifying the highest‑leverage technical problems, making strong architecturaldecisions, solving the hardest parts, and enabling engineering teams to build reliablesystems faster.

Why Join Us

• Build backend systems operating at significant global scale
• Solve challenging distributed systems and data architecture problems
• Influence architecture across multiple products and engineering teams
• Work with high‑volume APIs, event streams, databases, search systems, anddistributed infrastructure
• Drive improvements in scalability, reliability, performance, and engineeringefficiency
• Remain deeply technical without moving into people management
• Work in a fast‑moving engineering environment with significant autonomy andOwnership

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