Software Development Engineer- III | Media Core at HighLevel

About HighLevel HighLevel is a cloud-based, all-in-one white-label marketing and sales platform that empowers marketing agencies, entrepreneurs, and businesses to elevate their digital presence and drive growth. We are proud to support a global and growing community of over 2 million businesses, from marketing agencies to entrepreneurs to small businesses and beyond. Our platform empowers users across industries to streamline operations, drive growth, and crush their goals. HighLevel processes over 15 billion API hits and handles more than 2.5 billion message events every day. Our platform manages 470 terabytes of data distributed across five databases, operates with a network of over 250 micro-services, and supports over 1 million domain names. Our People With over 1,500 team members across 15+ countries, we operate in a global, remote-first environment. We are building more than software; we are building a global community rooted in creativity, collaboration, and impact. We take pride in cultivating a culture where innovation thrives, ideas are celebrated, and people come first, no matter where they call home. Our Impact Every month, our platform powers over 1.5 billion messages, helps generate over 200 million leads, and facilitates over 20 million conversations for the more than 2 million businesses we serve. Behind those numbers are real people growing their companies, connecting with customers, and making their mark - and we get to help make that happen. Learn more about us on our YouTube Channel or Blog Posts About the Role We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer (SDE-III) to join our Media Core Team, which powers the backbone of HighLevel's media infrastructure, enabling media streaming (video, audio, images), transcoding, DRM, and asset delivery at massive scale.Our Media Core platform processes more than 50 million monthly media streams, handles petabytes of media data, and delivers adaptive bitrate content to millions of users worldwide. We manage the complete media lifecycle: upload → transcode → secure → store → deliver — empowering creators to build video platforms, podcast platforms, course sites, and membership portals.As a Senior Software Engineer, you'll own critical services across our media stack including transcoding pipelines, DRM-protected streaming, image processing, and CDN delivery infrastructure. You'll work across the full stack, building media players, designing backend APIs, optimizing media processing workflows, and scaling distributed worker systems.This role requires deep expertise in media streaming systems, distributed architectures, and full-stack development. If you've worked on large-scale media platforms or scaled services under billions of requests, this is your team. Responsibilities Own and contribute to architecture and development across Media Core services including transcoding, DRM, streaming, image processing, and CDN delivery. Design and implement high-throughput media APIs with robust caching, message queues, and event-driven architectures. Build and optimize media transcoding pipelines handling multi-resolution encoding, audio processing, adaptive bitrate packaging, and cost-efficient processing at scale. Develop DRM systems and secure media delivery infrastructure, including authentication, access control, and encryption pipelines. Architect and scale distributed worker systems for processing high volumes of media files with auto-scaling and error recovery. Build high-quality frontend experiences including media players, upload widgets, and media management UIs. Optimize CDN delivery implementing intelligent caching strategies and low-latency streaming. Integrate observability, monitoring, and alerting systems to ensure platform reliability and rapid incident response. Debug complex production issues spanning frontend playback, backend transcoding, CDN configurations, and network performance. Participate in design reviews, on-call rotations, and technical deep dives to support a culture of operational excellence and ownership. Leverage AI/LLM tools to accelerate development, refactoring, testing, and debugging across the media stack. Requirements 4+ years of hands-on software engineering experience building and scaling robust backend systems and high-performance frontend applications. Media streaming systems experience: Strong understanding of media transcoding, streaming protocols, CDN architecture, and media pipelines at scale. Strong backend engineering skills: Proficiency in at least one backend (Node.js, Go, Python, Java, or similar), TypeScript, distributed system design, API development, microservices architecture, and event-driven systems. Media processing knowledge: Familiarity with media encoding tools, codec optimization, multi-resolution encoding, and adaptive streaming. Experience processing large media files efficiently. Frontend competence: Proficiency with modern frontend frameworks (React, Vue, Angular), advanced UI engineering patterns, component-based architectures, state management, and CSS libraries like Bootstrap or Tailwind CSS. Cloud and infrastructure experience: Working knowledge of cloud platforms (Google Cloud Platform or AWS), container orchestration, and CI/CD pipelines. Distributed systems knowledge: Experience with message queues (e.g., Redis, Kafka, Pub/Sub), worker architectures, async processing, and handling high-throughput workloads. Database proficiency: Experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis, along with designing data models for media metadata and access control. Performance optimization: Experience optimizing backend APIs, media processing workflows, and frontend playback. Familiarity with profiling and benchmarking. Security awareness: Understanding of authentication, authorization, DRM concepts, and secure media delivery practices. Observability and monitoring: Familiarity with monitoring and debugging tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Sentry), logging, error tracking, and debugging production issues. System design: Ability to design scalable solutions, understand distributed system patterns, and make informed cost/performance decisions. Ownership mindset: Track record of owning features end-to-end—shipping, monitoring, debugging production issues, and iterating based on feedback. Excellent communication: Ability to document systems, collaborate cross-functionally with PMs/designers, and contribute to technical discussions. Nice to have Experience with NGINX or similar CDN/edge delivery technologies Knowledge of DRM systems and content protection technologies  Hands-on experience with real-time streaming and WebRTC Image processing pipeline experience and format optimization  Experience with server-side rendering for media applications  Familiarity with media analytics and telemetry systems  Open-source contributions to media tools or libraries 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 record keeping, 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.