Staff Engineer - Contacts Platform at HighLevel

About HighLevel: HighLevel is an AI powered, all-in-one white-label sales & marketing platform that empowers 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, comprised of agencies, consultants, and businesses of all sizes and industries. HighLevel empowers users  with all the tools needed to capture, nurture, and close new leads into repeat customers. As of mid 2025, HighLevel processes over 4 billion API hits and handles more than 2.5 billion message events every day. Our platform manages over 470 terabytes of data distributed across five databases, operates with a network of over 250 microservices, and supports over 1 million hostnames. 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 As of mid 2025, 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 each month. Behind those numbers are real people growing their companies, connecting with customers, and making their mark - and we get to help make that happen. About the Team: Our platform enables customers to create 400 million+ new entities every day and perform 35 million+ search operations daily across billions of records. We build and maintain highly scalable backend systems and search engines that operate with extremely low latency and high accuracy. If you want to work on massive-scale distributed systems and solve real-time performance challenges, this is the right place. About the Role: We are seeking a Staff Engineer (Platform & Backend) who will operate primarily as a high-impact IC, while also influencing engineering practices and technical direction across teams.This role is not about delivering tickets — it’s about owning mission-critical services end-to-end, driving architectural decisions, understanding customer and internal pain points, and elevating the overall technical excellence of our platform. You will play a key role in improving performance, scalability, and reliability across distributed systems running at extraordinary scale. Responsibilities: • Architect and scale the Contact Creation Engine, ensuring a single source of truth for contact data with 99.95% availability and minimal latency • Enhance and evolve the Search Engine ecosystem, working with Elasticsearch, Firestore, and ClickHouse to deliver fast, accurate search results at scale • Own and optimise cloud-native infrastructure using Docker and advanced Kubernetes (cluster management, tuning, networking, and configuration) • Establish technical standards, drive architecture governance, conduct design reviews, and champion engineering best practices • Diagnose and solve complex production issues involving latency, throughput, system contention, scaling limits, and distributed node behavior • Create and analyze postmortems and implement long-term fixes to prevent recurrence • Partner closely with Product, Platform, and DevOps teams to architect shared services and ensure platform-wide reliability • Mentor engineers, influence technical decisions, and guide long-term platform evolution Requirements: • 8+ years in backend/system engineering roles with hands-on development • Expertise in distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures • Proven experience in system optimization and performance tuning • Strong hands-on skills in Docker and Kubernetes (cluster operations, tuning, networking). • Proficiency in backend languages: Node.js, Go • Strong database experience with indexing, schema design, and optimization for Elasticsearch, Firestore, ClickHouse • Understanding of caching strategies, message queues, and high-performance APIs • Cloud experience with AWS/GCP and CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins or similar) • Familiarity with observability tools such as Sentry, Grafana, ELK Preferred Qualifications: • Previous experience as a Tech Lead or Staff Engineer in a fast-growing, high-scale environment • Hands-on experience with Kafka/Google PubSub, Redis & Cloud Functions • Excellent communication and problem-solving skills • Ability to influence engineering culture and drive large technical initiatives 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. #LI-Remote #LI-HB1