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’re building a global commerce platform to power $1T+ in annual transactions for millions of SMEs. We want our Principal Enggs to be the technical force‑multiplier who sets the domain modelling, architecture, raises the reliability bar, and multiplies team effectiveness. You’ll steward our core commerce models—subscriptions, payments , Catalog, Pricing, Inventory, fulfillment, reconciliation , tax —and the services around them, ensuring correctness by design, auditability, and delightful performance at scale. This is an IC role with org‑level influence (no direct reports), focused on designing systems, shaping standards, and growing engineers.
Tech Stack:
Backend: Go, ConnectRPC
Databases: MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse
Cloud: GCP (GKE), Pub/Sub, Redis, OpenTelemetry
What You’ll Do:
- Architect and ship multi‑tenant, planet‑scale services (checkout, subscriptions, payments orchestration, invoicing, tax hooks) with clear domain boundaries (DDD) and hard SLOs
Be the custodian of API & schema design: own protobuf/ConnectRPC conventions, versioning policy, deprecation playbooks, and Buf breaking‑change checks—so our contracts stand the test of time
Guarantee resilience & availability of core payment paths: timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, idempotency keys, outbox/Saga patterns, hedged requests, and graceful degradation
Ensure complete auditability: append‑only double‑entry ledger, immutable event streams, trace‑linked entities (OTel trace/span IDs), tamper‑evident trails, and reconciliations that tie out to the cent
Own error boundaries end‑to‑end: enumerate failure domains (PSP, network, data, concurrency, quota, browser, device); design uniform error contracts; implement compensations/backfills and automated replay
Keep track of every deployed thing: services, workers, triggers, cron, subscriptions—own the service catalog and scorecards (owners, SLOs, runbooks, PDBs, HPA/VPA, budgets, quotas, timeouts)
Configuration & limits stewardship: enforce sane defaults across GKE, Pub/Sub, Redis, Firestore/Mongo, ClickHouse—connection pools, ack deadlines, batch sizes, TTLs, memory/FD limits, and GCP quotas
Observability as a product: pervasive OpenTelemetry, RED/USE metrics, exemplars, trace sampling, SLO dashboards, and alerting that wakes humans only for user‑impacting issues
Production excellence: canary/blue‑green rollouts, automated rollbacks, chaos drills, DR playbooks (RPO/RTO), multi‑region failover strategies, and incident command on rotation
Security & compliance by design: PCI scope minimization, tokenization/vaulting, secrets/KMS hygiene, data retention/archival, and privacy controls—embed checks in CI/CD
Developer acceleration: pave golden paths (service templates, ADR/RFC process, linting/formatting, contract tests, ephemeral envs, load/perf harnesses) to make the right thing the easy thing
What You’ll Lead:
- Core domain evolution: orchestration → ledger → reconciliation flows with crisp invariants and consistency guarantees (read‑your‑writes where needed, eventual where appropriate)
Reliability strategy: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, cost/FinOps guardrails, multi‑region posture, and DR exercises
API & data governance: canonical models, schema lifecycle (compatibility matrix, migrations), data lifecycle (retention, archival, compliance)
Practice leadership for HighLevel: design reviews, postmortems, technical strategy, coding standards, and mentorship across teams—raise the bar for the org
Hiring & team growth: help us hire, scale, and train the right team; shape interview loops, rubrics, onboarding, and ongoing learning (brown bags, reviews, pair design)
Cross‑functional partnership: collaborate with Product/Marketing/Support to translate platform capabilities and constraints into roadmaps, GTM narratives, and reliable customer outcomes
Risk & roadmap: maintain a technical risk register, make build‑vs‑buy calls, and propose simplifications or deprecations that meaningfully reduce complexity and MTTR
Minimum Qualifications:
- 10+ years building and operating backend systems (at least 5+ years in Go), with 2–3+ years acting as a Staff/Principal‑level IC or Tech Lead for critical paths
Deep proficiency with protobuf + ConnectRPC/gRPC and API lifecycle management (versioning, compatibility, contract testing, Buf)
Distributed systems fundamentals: idempotency, exactly‑once‑ish via dedupe/outbox, ordering, consensus basics, backpressure, concurrency control
Event‑driven architectures on GCP (Pub/Sub), plus Redis for fast paths; strong schema design in MongoDB/Firestore and analytics/reporting patterns on ClickHouse
Kubernetes/GKE operations at scale: autoscaling (HPA/VPA), PDBs, resource limits/requests, multi‑region topologies, CI/CD, canary/blue‑green
Reliability engineering: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity & load testing, incident management, DR/BCP
Security & compliance: secrets/KMS best practices, PCI basics (scope reduction, key rotation), and data governance (retention/archival)
Testing discipline: unit, integration, contract, property‑based, performance; test data management and deterministic environments
Frontend collaboration: solid understanding of Vue.js + TanStack Query to shape clean API surfaces and performance budgets across the boundary
Exceptional technical writing & communication: design docs, ADRs/RFCs, postmortems, and stakeholder updates
Nice to Have:
Hands‑on integrations with major PSPs/local rails (e.g., UPI, wallets, BNPL, cards/3DS2) and reconciliation at scale
Experience with active‑active or multi‑region designs; chaos engineering; traffic management
Observability leadership with OpenTelemetry at org scale (tail‑based sampling, exemplars)
FinOps experience: cost baselining, quotas, budget alarms, and workload right‑sizing
Familiarity with regulatory frameworks (PCI DSS, SOC 2/ISO 27001) and privacy laws relevant to our markets
EEO Statement:
The company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. As an employer subject to affirmative action regulations, we invite you to voluntarily provide the following demographic information. This information is used solely for compliance with government recordkeeping, reporting, and other legal requirements. Providing this information is voluntary and refusal to do so will not affect your application status. This data will be kept separate from your application and will not be used in the hiring decision.
We encourage you to review our Privacy Policy before submitting your application
Skills Required
- 10+ years building and operating backend systems
- At least 5 years of experience with Go
- 2–3+ years as a Staff or Principal-level individual contributor or technical lead for critical paths
- Deep proficiency with Protocol Buffers, ConnectRPC/gRPC, API lifecycle management, versioning, compatibility, contract testing, and Buf
- Strong distributed systems knowledge, including idempotency, outbox patterns, ordering, consensus basics, backpressure, and concurrency control
- Experience with event-driven architectures on GCP Pub/Sub and Redis
- Strong schema design in MongoDB and Firestore, plus analytics/reporting patterns in ClickHouse
- Kubernetes/GKE operations at scale, including autoscaling, PDBs, resource management, multi-region topologies, CI/CD, and canary or blue-green deployments
- Reliability engineering experience with SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, capacity and load testing, incident management, and disaster recovery/business continuity planning
- Security and compliance knowledge, including secrets and KMS practices, PCI basics, key rotation, retention, archival, and data governance
- Experience with unit, integration, contract, property-based, and performance testing
- Solid understanding of Vue.js and TanStack Query for frontend collaboration
- Exceptional technical writing and communication skills, including design documents, ADRs, RFCs, postmortems, and stakeholder updates
- Hands-on integrations with major payment service providers or local payment rails, such as UPI, wallets, BNPL, cards, or 3DS2
- Experience with active-active or multi-region designs, chaos engineering, or traffic management
- Organization-scale OpenTelemetry observability leadership, including tail-based sampling and exemplars
- FinOps experience with cost baselining, quotas, budget alarms, and workload right-sizing
- Familiarity with PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and relevant privacy laws
HighLevel Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about HighLevel and has not been reviewed or approved by HighLevel.
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Healthcare Strength — Employer materials highlight employer-paid medical and vision for employees, with mental health support and short‑term disability included. Feedback suggests health coverage is a relative bright spot that can raise overall satisfaction even when base pay is not top‑tier.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Flexible PTO, paid family leave, and paid holidays are emphasized alongside a remote‑first setup. Feedback suggests this time‑off approach supports work–life balance and is frequently cited as part of the value proposition.
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Retirement Support — A company‑matched 401(k) is presented as part of the core package. Feedback suggests retirement support contributes meaningful long‑term value and helps offset tradeoffs in cash compensation.
HighLevel Insights
What We Do
https://www.gohighlevel.com/quick-links One white-labeled marketing app to rule them all. HighLevel is everything your business needs to succeed! Capture leads using our landing pages, surveys, forms, calendars, inbound phone system & more! Automatically message leads via voicemail, forced calls, SMS, emails, FB Messenger & more! Use our built in tools to collect payments, schedule appointments, and track analytics
