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:
Custom Objects power some of the most flexible CRM use cases in HighLevelfrom real estate properties to SaaS subscriptions to health records. This team builds the foundational layer that supports:
- Dynamic schemas defined at runtime
- Complex relationships across contacts, companies, and opportunities
- High-throughput reads/writes across billions of records
- Querying, indexing, and filtering at massive scale
Our mission:Deliver a fully flexible CRM model that stays fast and reliableno matter how customers customize it.
About the Role:
We're hiring a Lead Engineer to scale and optimize the Custom Objects Platform. You'll work on distributed systems, query performance, caching strategies, and runtime efficiency that impacts every interaction customers have with custom data.You won't just optimize slow endpoints you will design scalable data access patterns, eliminate bottlenecks, and ensure reliability across high-traffic object services.This is a hands-on role with wide influence across architecture, performance standards, and operational excellence.
Responsibilities:
- Improve performance and reduce latency:
- Come up with architectural planning for implementing new features around custom objects
- Diagnose and remove bottlenecks in backend services, APIs, and message flows
- Profile Node.js services (CPU, heap, event loop) and rewrite hot paths for efficiency
- Strengthen platform reliability:
- Improve resilience via batching, caching, pooling, concurrency controls, and backpressure
- Harden services against cascading failures and dependency slowness
- Establish rate-limiting, queueing, and circuit-breaker patterns that scale under load
- Optimize database queries, indexing strategies, denormalization, and read/write paths
- Collaborate on infrastructure & operations:
- Work with SRE and Infra teams on autoscaling, capacity planning, quotas, and workload efficiency
- Contribute to runtime configuration improvements (GKE, Node.js, Redis, Pub/Sub, Firestore, ClickHouse)
- Participate in performance incident reviews and drive actionable root-cause fixes
- Build long-lasting performance frameworks:
- Define best practices for high-performance microservices, distributed patterns, and observability
- Create reusable performance tooling, dashboards, and profiling workflows
- Mentor engineers on writing scalable code, interpreting metrics, and designing reliable services
Requirements:
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience focused on large-scale systems.
- Strong experience with Node.js internals (event loop, memory model, async behavior)
- Proficiency in diagnosing performance issues using CPU/heap profilers, tracing, and metrics
- Solid understanding of Microservices, Distributed systems, High-throughput APIs, Caching strategies, Queuing/Backpressure patterns & Rate limiting/load balancing
- Experience with MongoDB, Postgres/MySQL, Firestore, Redis, ClickHouse, or similar DBs
- Familiarity with Kubernetes, GCP/AWS, and observability tooling (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry)
- Possess strong communication skills & are able to explain bottlenecks clearly without finger-pointing
- A mindset that treats every millisecond, query, and allocation as something to optimize thoughtfully
Nice to Have:
- Experience with high-traffic Node.js services serving millions of requests/hour.
- Familiarity with distributed tracing (OTel), tail sampling, RED/USE metrics, and SLO-driven engineering
- Experience preventing and mitigating cascading failures at scale
- Background in runtime optimization, capacity planning, or SRE-style operational excellence
- Contributions to internal performance frameworks, profiling tools, or reliability toolkits
EEO Statement:
At HighLevel, we value diversity. In fact, we understand it makes our organisation stronger. We are committed to inclusive hiring/promotion practices that evaluate skill sets, abilities, and qualifications without regard to any characteristic unrelated to performing the job at the highest level. Our objective is to foster an environment where really talented employees from all walks of life can be their true and whole selves, cherished and welcomed for their differences while providing excellent service to our clients and learning from one another along the way! Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform essential functions.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.
