Sr. Engineering Manager - Commerce

The Role

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.

About the Role:

We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the team building HighLevel's Payments Platform. This leader will own the execution, reliability, and evolution of the platform that powers checkout, subscriptions, payment orchestration, invoicing, and financial reconciliation at scale.This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you'll partner closely with Product, Design, Finance, Support, Infrastructure, and other engineering teams to deliver reliable, secure, and scalable payment experiences. You'll build and grow a high-performing engineering team while driving technical strategy, operational excellence, and stakeholder alignment.

Requirements:

12+ years of experience building scalable backend distributed systems, including 5+ years working with Go

5+ years of experience managing software engineering teams delivering large-scale backend platforms

Proven experience leading teams responsible for business-critical distributed systems with high availability and reliability requirements

Experience partnering with Product Managers and cross-functional stakeholders to define roadmaps, manage priorities, and deliver customer-facing capabilities

Strong track record of hiring, coaching, mentoring, and growing engineering talent

Deep understanding of distributed systems including event-driven architectures, asynchronous messaging, consistency models, idempotency, concurrency control, and resilience patterns

Experience with Kubernetes/GKE, GCP services (Pub/Sub, Redis, MongoDB/Firestore, ClickHouse), CI/CD, and cloud-native infrastructure

Strong understanding of API lifecycle management including protobuf, ConnectRPC/gRPC, versioning strategies, and contract testing

Experience driving engineering operational excellence through SLIs/SLOs, observability, incident management, disaster recovery, and capacity planning

Familiarity with security and compliance best practices including PCI, secrets management, data governance, and privacy controls

Excellent communication skills with experience presenting technical strategy, delivery updates, and architectural decisions to senior stakeholders and executives

What You'll Lead:

Team Leadership:

Team growth, hiring, mentoring, and performance management

Career development and succession planning

Engineering culture focused on ownership and continuous improvement

Platform Delivery

End-to-end execution of Payments Platform initiatives

Cross-functional roadmap planning and prioritization

Delivery predictability across multiple workstreams

Technical Excellence

Platform architecture evolution in partnership with senior technical leaders

Reliability strategy including SLIs, SLOs, capacity planning, and incident management

API governance, data lifecycle management, and operational excellence

Stakeholder Management

Product roadmap planning and execution

Executive communication and engineering updates

Cross-functional collaboration across Product, Infrastructure, Finance, Compliance, Support, and Security

Managing competing priorities while balancing customer outcomes and technical investments

Responsibilities:

- Lead and Grow a High-Performing Engineering Team:

Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing team of backend engineers

Create an environment of ownership, accountability, continuous learning, and technical excellence

Coach engineers through regular feedback, career development, performance management, and growth planning

Drive hiring strategy, interview quality, onboarding, and succession planning

Foster engineering best practices through design reviews, code quality, technical mentorship, and knowledge sharing

- Drive Execution & Delivery:

Own execution for the Payments Platform roadmap, ensuring predictable delivery across multiple concurrent initiatives

Balance business priorities with long-term platform investments, technical debt reduction, and reliability improvements

Coordinate cross-team dependencies while proactively identifying risks, blockers, and execution gaps

Lead sprint planning, roadmap planning, estimation, prioritization, and delivery reviews

Ensure engineering teams consistently deliver high-quality, maintainable software

- Partner with Cross-functional Stakeholders:

Work closely with Product, Finance, Compliance, Customer Success, Marketing, Infrastructure, and Security teams to translate business objectives into technical roadmaps

Communicate engineering tradeoffs, delivery timelines, risks, and technical decisions to executive stakeholders

Align multiple engineering teams around shared architectural decisions, platform capabilities, and operational goals

Drive roadmap planning while balancing customer impact, platform scalability, and engineering investments

- Own Platform Reliability & Operational Excellence:

Lead the team responsible for highly available, planet-scale payment infrastructure including checkout, subscriptions, payment orchestration, invoicing, ledger, and reconciliation services

Ensure the team designs resilient distributed systems using patterns such as:

Idempotency

Retry strategies

Circuit breakers

Saga/Outbox patterns

Graceful degradation

Multi-region failover

Champion production excellence through:

SLO ownership

Error budgets

Incident management

Disaster recovery planning

Capacity planning

Operational readiness reviews

- Drive Technical Strategy:

Partner with Staff and Principal Engineers to evolve platform architecture and technical direction

Guide architectural decisions around:

Domain Driven Design

API governance

Event-driven systems

Service boundaries

Data consistency models

Ensure engineering teams maintain strong engineering standards for API lifecycle management, schema evolution, observability, security, and platform reliability

Lead technical planning while balancing scalability, maintainability, delivery speed, and operational cost

- Champion Engineering Excellence:

Establish engineering standards for:

API design

Code quality

Testing strategy

CI/CD

Documentation

Operational readiness

Promote a strong engineering culture through design reviews, RFCs, ADRs, postmortems, and continuous improvement initiatives

Drive adoption of developer productivity improvements including service templates, automated testing, observability, and deployment tooling

Additional Information

EEO Statement:

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