Software Development Engineer II - Conversations

About HighLevel:

HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that gives agencies, entrepreneurs and SMBs the infrastructure to build, automate and scale. Today, HighLevel supports SMBs across 150+ countries, fueling community-driven growth rooted in real customer outcomes. To date, businesses operating on HighLevel have generated over $7 billion in ecosystem value, demonstrating the impact of shared infrastructure at scale. By centralizing conversations, automation and intelligence into one system, we help businesses move faster, reduce complexity and execute efficiently. Behind the platform, HighLevel powers more than 4 billion API hits and 2.5 billion message events daily. With 250 terabytes of distributed data, 250+ microservices and over 1 million domain names supported, our architecture is built for performance, resilience and long-term scalability.

Our people With over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries, HighLevel operates as a global, remote-first organization built for speed and ownership. We value initiative, clarity and execution, creating space for ambitious people to build systems that support millions of businesses worldwide. Here, innovation thrives, ideas are celebrated and people come first, no matter where they call home.

Our impact Every month, HighLevel enables more than 1.5 billion messages, 200 million leads and 20 million conversations for the more than 1 million businesses we support. Behind those numbers are real people building independence, expanding opportunity and creating measurable impact. We’re proud to be a part of that. Learn more about us on our YouTube Channel or Blog Posts.

What are we hiring for?

The systems that run millions of businesses. 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. If these systems lag, businesses lose leads. If they go down, people lose income. You haven't built at this scale yet. That's fine - almost nobody has. What we're hiring for is the engineer who reads those numbers and feels pulled toward them. Who wants to know what a queue looks like when it's absorbing a 10x burst, what an index does at 1.5 TB, what "eventually consistent" actually means when a customer is staring at the screen. You'll work on real production paths from week one — with senior engineers around you who've broken and fixed these systems before. You'll build. You'll break things. You'll learn faster here than anywhere else.

Team & System Overview:

The Conversations organization powers multi-channel communication across SMS, Email, WhatsApp, and DMs — handling over 2B messages each month. The Threads & Composer team owns the inbox and composer surfaces, and the backend services that deliver and store those interactions. You’ll work across Node.js microservices, GCP-based infra (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks), and MongoDB/Firestore storage layers, ensuring every message and UI state stays consistent, fast, and recoverable.

Responsibilities:

• Build and ship features in Node.js / Go services that sit on real production paths — your code handles live traffic, not toy problems
• Own well-scoped services and components end to end: code, tests, rollout, and monitoring
• Work with SQL and NoSQL data stores — writing queries, adding indexes, and learning why the schema looks the way it does
• Get hands-on with queues, caches, and rate limiters — the building blocks of every system here
• Ship Vue 3 UIs that consume your own APIs — clean components, sane state management, and realtime updates that don't flicker or drift
• Write design docs for your features and defend them in review — clear thinking, honest trade-offs
• Join the on-call rotation with backup from senior engineers — incidents are where the deepest learning happens
• Ask questions relentlessly, absorb feedback from code reviews, and level up fast

Requirements:

• 2+ years of backend engineering experience with strong fundamentals in Node.js, Go, or a comparable language — and the drive to go deep in ours
• Working knowledge of queues or async processing — you've used Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar, and want to master delivery semantics, ordering, and backpressure
• Genuine interest in distributed systems — you understand the basics (idempotency, retries, consistency trade-offs) and are hungry to learn the rest by building
• Hands-on with Redis or another cache/in-memory store, even at small scale
• Comfortable with SQL or NoSQL databases — you can model data, write efficient queries, and reason about indexes
• Proficient in Vue 3 or a similar modern frontend framework — solid component design and real experience with state management (Pinia, Vuex, or equivalent)
• You write tests as a habit and can put your design thinking into a clear doc
• AI-native builder — you code with agents daily and are pushing to get accurate, production-quality output from them

Technical Environment:

• Languages: Node.js (TypeScript), Go
• Frontend: Vue 3, TypeScript, Pinia, Vite, Tailwind
• Storage: MongoDB, Firestore, Redis, ElasticSearch, ClickHouse
• Infra: GCP — GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes

Why This Role

Most engineers spend years at companies where "scale" means a few hundred requests per second — and never find out what they're capable of. Here, the systems are the teacher. Every design decision has a visible consequence at billions of events a month. Every incident is a masterclass. You'll sit in architecture reviews with staff engineers debating storage engines and consistency models — and within a year, you'll be contributing to those debates, not just watching them. If you optimize your career for learning velocity, there is no faster track than this.

On AI

We're past the debate. AI is part of how we build - and we expect you to be hungry for it. You already code with agents daily. You're learning what they're good at, where they hallucinate, and how to get accurate, tested, slop-free code out of them fast. You treat AI as a multiplier on your learning speed, not a substitute for understanding. 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're deeply curious — you don't stop at "it works," you need to know why it works
• You read post-mortems and system-design write-ups for fun, not because someone assigned them
• You've built things beyond your job description — side projects, internal tools, that one system you rewrote because the old one bothered you
• You take feedback like a gift: code review comments make your next PR better, every time
• When something breaks, your first instinct is curiosity, not panic

What Success looks like

• You own a service or component that the team trusts you on completely
• You're a dependable on-call engineer — you've debugged real incidents and shipped the fixes
• Your design docs have gone from "reviewed heavily" to "approved with nits"
• Senior engineers pull you into harder problems — because you've earned it
• You're visibly on the path to SDE-3, and everyone around you knows it

Bonus Points

• Familiarity with our stack: GCP, MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse, ElasticSearch
• You've contributed to a messaging, automation, or event-driven system — at any scale
• Side projects or open-source work that shows you build because you can't not build

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 recordkeeping, 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 encourage you to review our Privacy Policy before submitting your application.