Staff Backend Engineer - Trust & Control Safety Systems

The role

You will lead the technical direction of a real-time platform that secures critical workflows across HighLevel, including signups, SaaS checkouts, user management and global communication usage. You will set technical direction, own the hardest backend problems, and mentor engineers across squads.

What you will do

• Redesign and optimize data models, queries, and indexing strategies across MongoDB, Firestore, and ElasticSearch
• Own ElasticSearch reliability: ingestion, indexing, shard strategy, and query performance for billions of documents
• Eliminate bottlenecks, improve replication health, and enforce predictable query and index latency
• Define data flow and integration boundaries between storage, cache, and APIs with clear contracts and fault isolation
• Build visibility into every data path: metrics, traces, slow query logs, replication lag, and cluster health dashboards
• Enforce unit, integration, and load testing standards across all backend modules
• Drive RFCs, ADRs, and design reviews that push clarity and precision
• Write code, design systems, and debug production issues
• Level up engineers through reviews, feedback, and systems that outlive individuals
• Partner with EMs, PMs, Finance, Risk, Support and channel teams

Required qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building high-scale, mission-critical backend systems
• Deep expertise in concurrency, event-driven architectures, and consistency primitives (CAS, atomic dry-runs, idempotency)
• Experience with systems where correctness has financial consequences, such as metering, ledgers, billing, reservations, or comparable transactional domains
• Technical leadership through influence, driving architecture for multi-team platforms from design to production
• Strong experience with relational and NoSQL data models, plus working knowledge of streaming and analytical stores
• Experience designing policy- or rules-driven systems that change through configuration, with versioning, safe rollout, and rollback
• Judgement on enforcement trade-offs: setting thresholds that stop real harm without punishing legitimate customers, and measuring the result
• Familiarity with monitoring, SLOs, and root-cause analysis in production environments
• Familiarity with hallucination mitigation strategies (e.g., code constraints, test scaffolding, embeddings, context injection)
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, including with Finance, Risk and Support
• A pragmatic, hands-on engineer who balances long-term vision with iterative execution

Nice to have

• Experience with ElasticSearch cluster management, multi-tenant indexing, or lifecycle policies
• Familiarity with ClickHouse or other OLAP systems for analytics
• Background in event-driven systems, data pipelines, or message brokers
• Contributions to open-source or public technical writing on database performance or systems design
• Experience building rules engines, velocity checks, or adversarial defense systems at scale
• Hands-on with Go, Redis (Lua), ClickHouse, and Flink for real-time aggregation
• Experience navigating the transition from early architecture to load-bearing platform at scale
• Exposure to stream processing (Flink, Kafka Streams, Beam) and columnar stores (ClickHouse, BigQuery)
• Hands-on experience with Node.js and Go in production services on latency-sensitive paths
• Experience with AI tools, billing and metered systems

Before you apply

• The posting is marked #LI-Remote and #LI-NJ1, and describes HighLevel as a global, remote-first organization with team members across 10+ countries

About the company

HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that gives agencies, entrepreneurs and SMBs infrastructure to build, automate and scale. The company reports over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries and supports more than 1 million businesses.