Backend Engineer (Node.js/Go) at HighLevel

What are we hiring for?

Every month, 2.6 billion messages flow through our platform. Our automation engine enrolls 3.1 billion contacts and executes 21.5 billion workflow actions in the same window — with API traffic peaking at 28,000+ requests per second. Booking appointments, closing deals, answering customers. If these systems lag, businesses lose leads. If they go down, people lose income.

We're hiring backend engineers who treat that as a design constraint, not a fun fact.

This isn't a role where you'll implement someone else's spec. You'll be handed problems that don't have a known answer yet — a datastore buckling under index growth, a queue that needs to absorb 10x burst traffic without dropping a message, a state machine with millions of concurrent executions. You'll figure it out. And you'll own it.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build Node.js / Go services on critical paths — high throughput, low latency, zero tolerance for data loss

• Own systems end to end: architecture, design docs, code, tests, rollout, and production health

• Model and optimize data layers across SQL and NoSQL stores handling high read/write volumes and atomic updates

• Build queueing, caching, and rate-limiting layers that keep the platform graceful under burst traffic

• Instrument everything — logs, metrics, traces — so you know your system is healthy before anyone asks

• Debug production incidents, ship the fix, drive the post-mortem to closure

• Review code, raise the bar, and pull the engineers around you up with you.

Requirements:

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience, with deep hands-on work in Node.js and/or Go

• Queueing experience — you've designed with Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Cloud Tasks, or similar, and you understand delivery semantics, ordering, and backpressure

• Complex distributed systems experience — consistency trade-offs, idempotency, fault tolerance, systems that stay correct under partial failure

• Hands-on with Redis or other in-memory data stores — caching strategies, data structures, and their failure modes

• Strong with SQL or NoSQL databases — schema design, indexing, and query optimization at high volume

• You write clear design docs and rigorous test cases as a habit, not on request

• Champion of AI-assisted engineering — you make agents produce accurate, production-quality code, fast

Technical Environment:

• Languages: Node.js (TypeScript), Go

• Storage: MongoDB, Firestore, Redis, ElasticSearch, ClickHouse

• Infra: GCP — GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks

• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes

On AI

We're past the debate. AI is part of how we build — and we expect you to be better at it than most.

That means making agents do real work: producing code that's accurate, tested, and slop-free — fast. You know when to hand a problem to an agent and when to take the wheel. You review AI output with the same rigor as a junior engineer's PR, and you ship at a pace that engineers without this skill can't match.

If you're still copy-pasting from a chat window and hoping, this isn't the seat for you.

What you're built for

• You've solved problems nobody handed you a playbook for — ideally in a 0→1 environment where the system didn't exist until you built it

• You understand systems in depth — not just the API surface, but what happens under load, at the tail, when the network partitions

• You write design docs people actually read — clear trade-offs, honest risks, a real recommendation

• You treat test cases as part of the design, not a chore after the fact

• When production breaks at 2 AM, your first instinct is curiosity, not panic

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with our stack: GCP, MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse, ElasticSearch

• You've built or scaled messaging, automation, or event-driven platforms

• You've taken a system from 0→1, or rebuilt one mid-flight without breaking it