Staff Software Engineer - Backend
Job Description
HighLevel is revolutionizing digital marketing with their AI-powered platform that serves over 2 million businesses globally. As a Staff Software Engineer - Backend, you'll be at the forefront of evolving their massive real-time messaging platform that processes over 15 billion API hits and 2.5 billion message events daily. The platform manages 470+ terabytes of data across five databases and 250+ microservices.
The role offers a unique opportunity to lead critical backend infrastructure development, working with cutting-edge technologies like Node.js, Firestore, MongoDB, and ClickHouse. You'll be responsible for improving core delivery systems, shaping backend architecture, and ensuring scalability across 50+ workloads and thousands of pods.
Working in a remote-first environment with 1,500+ team members across 15+ countries, you'll join a global community that values innovation and collaboration. The impact is significant - you'll help power over 1.5 billion messages and generate 200 million leads monthly for businesses worldwide.
This position is perfect for an experienced backend engineer who excels in distributed systems, enjoys technical leadership, and wants to solve complex scaling challenges. You'll have the opportunity to mentor others while working on systems that directly impact millions of businesses. The role combines technical expertise with leadership, offering both technical challenges and professional growth in a rapidly expanding company.
Responsibilities For Staff Software Engineer - Backend
- Write clean, observable, and testable backend code
- Architect and scale backend systems for message ingestion, delivery, storage, and retries
- Lead re-architecture efforts to improve reliability, latency, and observability
- Drive infra decisions across GCP, Kubernetes, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, and custom queueing models
- Own core services: delivery guarantees, message deduplication, state transitions, retry semantics
- Partner with platform and SRE teams to ensure autoscaling, fault tolerance, and production readiness
- Guide API boundaries, system interactions, and contracts across services
- Mentor engineers in distributed systems, data models, and real-world scale
- Own incidents, root cause, recovery, and prevention — not just alerts
Requirements For Staff Software Engineer - Backend
- 7+ years in backend engineering; proven experience scaling systems with massive throughput
- Deep expertise in databases: Firestore, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, ClickHouse
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, GCP (or AWS), and event-driven infra
- Clear understanding of distributed systems principles: CAP tradeoffs, consistency, rate limiting, retries, idempotency
- Strong API and system boundary design in micro-services ecosystems
- Crisp communication — technical leadership without posturing
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