Staff Software Engineer(Golang) - Payments & Commerce Platform

About Us:
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 15 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 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
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 Role
We’re building a global commerce platform to power $1T+ in annual transactions for millions of SMEs. Our SDE V (Staff) is the technical force‑multiplier who sets the architecture, raises the reliability bar, and multiplies team effectiveness. You’ll steward our core payments models—subscriptions, payments , reconciliation , tax —and the services around them, ensuring correctness by design, auditability, and delightful performance at scale. This is an IC role with org‑level influence (no direct reports), focused on designing systems, shaping standards, and growing engineers.

Stack:Backend: Go, ConnectRPC, Buf
Frontend: Vue.js, Vite, Webpack MFA, TanStack Query
Databases: MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse
Cloud: GCP (GKE), Pub/Sub, Redis, OpenTelemetry

What You’ll Do:
• Architect and ship multi‑tenant, planet‑scale services (checkout, subscriptions, payments orchestration, invoicing, tax hooks) with clear domain boundaries (DDD) and hard SLOs.
• Be the custodian of API & schema design: own protobuf/ConnectRPC conventions, versioning policy, deprecation playbooks, and Buf breaking‑change checks—so our contracts stand the test of time.
• Guarantee resilience & availability of core payment paths: timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, idempotency keys, outbox/Saga patterns, hedged requests, and graceful degradation.
• Ensure complete auditability: append‑only double‑entry ledger, immutable event streams, trace‑linked entities (OTel trace/span IDs), tamper‑evident trails, and reconciliations that tie out to the cent.
• Own error boundaries end‑to‑end: enumerate failure domains (PSP, network, data, concurrency, quota, browser, device); design uniform error contracts; implement compensations/backfills and automated replay.
• Keep track of every deployed thing: services, workers, triggers, cron, subscriptions—own the service catalog and scorecards (owners, SLOs, runbooks, PDBs, HPA/VPA, budgets, quotas, timeouts).
• Configuration & limits stewardship: enforce sane defaults across GKE, Pub/Sub, Redis, Firestore/Mongo, ClickHouse—connection pools, ack deadlines, batch sizes, TTLs, memory/FD limits, and GCP quotas.
• Observability as a product: pervasive OpenTelemetry, RED/USE metrics, exemplars, trace sampling, SLO dashboards, and alerting that wakes humans only for user‑impacting issues.
• Production excellence: canary/blue‑green rollouts, automated rollbacks, chaos drills, DR playbooks (RPO/RTO), multi‑region failover strategies, and incident command on rotation.
• Security & compliance by design: PCI scope minimization, tokenization/vaulting, secrets/KMS hygiene, data retention/archival, and privacy controls—embed checks in CI/CD.
• Developer acceleration: pave golden paths (service templates, ADR/RFC process, linting/formatting, contract tests, ephemeral envs, load/perf harnesses) to make the right thing the easy thing

What You’ll Lead:
• Core domain evolution: orchestration → ledger → reconciliation flows with crisp invariants and consistency guarantees (read‑your‑writes where needed, eventual where appropriate).
• Reliability strategy: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, cost/FinOps guardrails, multi‑region posture, and DR exercises.
• API & data governance: canonical models, schema lifecycle (compatibility matrix, migrations), data lifecycle (retention, archival, compliance).
• Practice leadership for HighLevel: design reviews, postmortems, technical strategy, coding standards, and mentorship across teams—raise the bar for the org.
• Hiring & team growth: help us hire, scale, and train the right team; shape interview loops, rubrics, onboarding, and ongoing learning (brown bags, reviews, pair design).
• Cross‑functional partnership: collaborate with Product/Marketing/Support to translate platform capabilities and constraints into roadmaps, GTM narratives, and reliable customer outcomes.
• Risk & roadmap: maintain a technical risk register, make build‑vs‑buy calls, and propose simplifications or deprecations that meaningfully reduce complexity and MTTR.

Minimum Qualifications:
• 10+ years building and operating backend systems (at least 5+ years in Go), with 2–3+ years acting as a Staff/Principal‑level IC or Tech Lead for critical paths.
• Deep proficiency with protobuf + ConnectRPC/gRPC and API lifecycle management (versioning, compatibility, contract testing, Buf).
• Distributed systems fundamentals: idempotency, exactly‑once‑ish via dedupe/outbox, ordering, consensus basics, backpressure, concurrency control.
• Event‑driven architectures on GCP (Pub/Sub), plus Redis for fast paths; strong schema design in MongoDB/Firestore and analytics/reporting patterns on ClickHouse.
• Kubernetes/GKE operations at scale: autoscaling (HPA/VPA), PDBs, resource limits/requests, multi‑region topologies, CI/CD, canary/blue‑green.
• Reliability engineering: SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity & load testing, incident management, DR/BCP.
• Security & compliance: secrets/KMS best practices, PCI basics (scope reduction, key rotation), and data governance (retention/archival).
• Testing discipline: unit, integration, contract, property‑based, performance; test data management and deterministic environments.
• Frontend collaboration: solid understanding of Vue.js + TanStack Query to shape clean API surfaces and performance budgets across the boundary.
• Exceptional technical writing & communication: design docs, ADRs/RFCs, postmortems, and stakeholder updates.

Nice to have
• Hands‑on integrations with major PSPs/local rails (e.g., UPI, wallets, BNPL, cards/3DS2) and reconciliation at scale.
• Experience with active‑active or multi‑region designs; chaos engineering; traffic management.
• Observability leadership with OpenTelemetry at org scale (tail‑based sampling, exemplars).
• FinOps experience: cost baselining, quotas, budget alarms, and workload right‑sizing.
• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks (PCI DSS, SOC 2/ISO 27001) and privacy laws relevant to our markets.

How we work:
• Pragmatic architecture with a bias to ship, measure, iterate.
• High ownership, low ego: design docs, incident reviews, data‑driven decisions.
• Product‑first mindset: we sweat the merchant and buyer experience.
• IC leadership: influence through design, docs, prototypes, and mentorship—not headcount.

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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