Director, Engineering (CRM)

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 1 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 1 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 Role:

We’re hiring a Director of Engineering to lead our Core CRM pillar—one of the most business-critical parts of HighLevel. This role will shape the technical direction and own engineering execution and organizational health across multiple CRM product domains (Contacts platform, data import/migration & bulk operations, Opportunities, and extensible CRM objects like Custom Objects/Companies/Tasks).

This is a high-ownership role in a fast-scaling environment: you’ll build and grow teams, partner tightly with Product and Design, and ensure we ship reliably at scale—without losing empathy for customers or for the engineers doing the work.

You will manage multiple Engineering Managers,who in turn lead teams responsible for:
1) Contacts, Tags, Documents, Custom Values, Lead Activity System, Smart Lists, Custom Fields
2) CRM data import/migration, Bulk Actions, Opportunities

Responsibilities::
Org Leadership & Team Building

• Build and execute hiring plans to close critical team gaps quickly, especially across under-resourced areas.
Recruit, onboard, and mentor senior engineers and engineering leaders while creating an environment where new hires ramp quickly and succeed.

• Own talent outcomes: performance management, growth plans, retention, and creating a strong leadership bench.

Execution Ownership

• Balance platform health with product delivery—reduce toil, retire risk, and keep systems scalable.

• Establish strong engineering fundamentals across teams including code quality, observability, and operational readiness

• Drive delivery across CRM initiatives with high reliability and predictable throughput.

Customer-Obsessed Engineering Leadership

• Bring deep empathy for customers and their workflows; ensure CRM experiences are stable, intuitive, and trustworthy.

• Establish mechanisms to learn from customer pain signals including support insights, incident reviews, and quality metrics.

Cross-functional Partnership & “Single-Threaded Ownership”

• Partner with Product, Design, and peer engineering leaders to align priorities, sequencing, and outcomes.

• Represent CRM engineering in planning and tradeoff conversations—advocate for the right investments and timelines.

• Create clarity: what we’re building, why it matters, and how we’ll measure success.

Technical Leadership

• Be hands-on enough to guide architecture and technical direction through your Engineering Managers and Staff Engineers

• Raise the bar on system design, performance, scalability, and operational excellence in CRM services and UI surfaces.

• Establish and track engineering/platform KPIs (quality, reliability, velocity, hiring health) for the CRM pillar.

• Drive long-term platform investments that enable the CRM infrastructure to support continued growth

Requirements::
• 12+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years in engineering leadership, including managing managers.

• Proven track record building and scaling teams in a high-growth, high-ownership environment.

• Strong execution and operating cadence: planning, prioritization, delivery, and accountability across multiple teams.

• Customer-first mindset with high empathy, strong judgment, and ability to make tradeoffs that protect user trust.

• Technical depth to guide architecture, reliability, and long-term platform investments.

• Excellent communication and cross-functional influence—able to align Product/Design/Engineering and drive decisions.

What Success Looks Like (First 6–12 Months):
• Teams are staffed toward plan (key gaps closed), and onboarding/ramp produces consistently effective engineers.

• Clear ownership and operating rhythm across the three CRM sub-areas; delivery becomes more predictable.

• Measurable improvements in CRM quality/reliability (fewer regressions, faster detection, better incident hygiene).

• CRM platform health improves through reduced technical debt and stronger performance and scalability signals.

• EMs are thriving with strong coaching, clarity, and autonomy—your org runs smoothly without constant escalation

Preferred Qualifications::
• Experience owning large “core product” surfaces (CRM, data-heavy SaaS, workflow products).

• Experience scaling systems and teams in a high-traffic SaaS environment.

• Experience with microservices architectures and platform modernization in fast-growing companies.

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.

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