Lead Backend Engineer - Contacts

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 Lead Engineer - 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::
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to junior and senior engineers, fostering an environment of technical improvement and high-pace execution
• Lead the team through critical architectural, product, and technical decisions, including long-term scalability planning
• Participate in hands-on coding for critical development efforts, leading by example
• Enforce engineering excellence standards through rigorous code reviews, design discussions, and the promotion of technical best practices
• Own the end-to-end delivery lifecycle for large-scale, high-impact software projects
• Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Engineering Managers, Designers, QA, and other cross-functional teams to define, align, and execute the technical roadmap
• Ensure timely project delivery while maintaining high quality, system reliability, and performance
• Proactively identify and mitigate technical risks, resolve system bottlenecks, and address performance issues
• Actively support the professional growth and career development of team members
• Contribute to shaping the team's engineering culture, continuously improving processes, and maintaining high team productivity
• Influence critical talent processes, including hiring, onboarding, and team structuring, to effectively scale the organization
• Drive the adoption and continuous improvement of best practices across the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Agile methodologies

Requirements::
• 5+ years in backend/system engineering roles with hands-on development
• Expertise in distributed systems, microservices, event-driven architectures
• Strong hands-on skills in Docker and Kubernetes
• Proficiency in backend languages: Node.js, Go or Similar
• 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

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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