Staff Software Engineer - 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

Minimum Qualifications

Nice to have

How We Work

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.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.

Skills Required

Security Compliance, Go, Redis, GRPC, Pub Sub, Vue.JS, Gcp, Mongodb, Kubernetes