Staff Engineer - CRM & Automation

The role

You will look across HighLevel's distributed systems to find risks that no single team can see, starting with Workflows and then Conversations and the new Ticketing platform. You will approve critical-path designs, prototype risky architecture bets, and help make the platform resilient as traffic grows.

What you will do

• Own the architecture health of a billion-scale distributed system, including failure modes, capacity limits, consistency guarantees and interactions between 50+ deployments
• Approve critical-path designs that touch the system's core
• Find gaps such as single points of failure, unbounded queues, missing idempotency and thundering herds, and drive fixes before they become incidents
• Prototype risky architectural bets, ship remediation after serious incidents, and help with the hardest cross-team bugs, spending roughly a quarter to a third of your time in code
• Make resilience a property of the system through degradation strategies, backpressure, isolation boundaries and capacity models
• Raise the teams around you through design reviews, post-mortems that change architecture, and shared patterns
• Set the standard for how AI-assisted engineering works safely on critical systems

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of engineering experience with hands-on ownership of large-scale distributed systems
• Sole accountability for a production system through real failures
• Deep knowledge of queueing and async architectures, including delivery semantics, ordering, backpressure and idempotency
• Strong experience with multiple storage engines (SQL and NoSQL) and their consistency models
• Expert-level depth in Redis or comparable in-memory systems, including failure modes under memory pressure and network partition
• Production experience on Kubernetes at scale
• Exceptional design communication through docs, diagrams and RCAs that drive decisions across teams
• Fluent in Node.js and/or Go

Nice to have

• Comparable scale: hundreds of services or thousands of instances, billions of daily events
• Experience with AI agents on complex systems and keeping AI-generated code safe
• GCP-native experience with Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, GKE and Firestore
• Experience taking a 0 to 1 system to production alongside hardening mature ones

Before you apply

• Visa sponsorship: not stated

About the company

HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that gives agencies, entrepreneurs and SMBs infrastructure to build, automate and scale. It has over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries and works as a global, remote-first organization.