Engineering Manager - 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
About the Role:
What are we hiring for?
We're going to replace the inbox. All of it.
Gmail. Outlook. Front. Every single-channel and omnichannel inbox out there.
Conversations is the most-used surface in HighLevel - the page where our customers spend the majority of their day. Every SMS, email, WhatsApp, DM, and call lands here. It's where deals get closed, customers get answered, and businesses get run.
We want to make it the only inbox a business will ever need.
That's the bar. And you'll lead the team building it.
The Mission
Build the omnichannel inbox that every business in the world wishes they had - fast, reliable, intuitive, and deeply integrated with everything else our customers do.
You're not here to manage tickets. You're here to own the product surface that defines HighLevel - and lead the engineers who'll build it into the category winner.
Requirements:
8+ years in software engineering, with at least 2-3 years managing teams of 8+ engineers.
Hands-on technical depth - you can still review architecture, debug a production incident, and call out a bad design choice in a PR.
Excellent product judgment - proven track record of shipping products customers love, not just features that hit deadlines.
Experience leading teams that own a major product surface with high traffic, real-time requirements, and complex state.
Strong grasp of distributed systems and/or frontend systems at scale - ideally both.
Demonstrated ability to run ops cleanly - daily, sprintly, and quarterly - while keeping eyes on the long-term vision.
What You’ll Lead:
A team of 10+ engineers - juniors to seniors - building the Conversations product end to end: inbox UI, real-time threads, multi-channel routing, search, automations, and the platform underneath it all.
A product surface used by millions of users daily, processing 68M+ messages/month and climbing to billions.
Frontend, backend, and platform work across:
Frontend: Vue.js (2/3), Vuex/Pinia, Module Federation, real-time UI at scale
Backend: Node.js (TypeScript), Go, event-driven pipelines, 50+ workloads, thousands of pods
Infra: GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks), Firestore, MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch, ClickHouse
The roadmap, the architecture, and the people decisions that determine whether we win this category.
What You’ll Drive:
Bring strong product judgment to every roadmap call - what to build, what to kill, what to polish.
Partner with Product and Design as a true peer - push back, prototype, and ship things that customers actually feel.
Obsess over the details: latency, layout stability, the way a thread loads on a flaky network, the way a notification lands at the right moment.
Own the vision - quarterly bets, where the product needs to be in 12 months, what wedge we drive next.
Be hands-on. Read PRs that matter. Get into the code when the stakes are high. Stay technical enough that your team trusts your calls.
Own engineering velocity, quality, and stability - three numbers you live and die by.
Architect for the next 10x: delivery guarantees, retry semantics, idempotency, real-time sync, omnichannel state.
Run clean ops - daily standups that don't waste time, sprints that ship, quarters that compound.
Build a high-performing team by putting the right people in the right seats.
Regular 1:1s. Honest feedback. Real growth conversations. No surprises at performance review time.
Hire smart. Coach harder. Move people up - or move them out - without flinching.
Set a culture where engineers do their best work of their careers because of you, not in spite of you.
On the product side:
On the engineering side:
On the people side:
What Success Looks Like:
The team is shipping fast and clean. Velocity is high, regressions are rare, and on-call is boring.
Customers tell us, "I don't need Gmail anymore."Then they tell their friends.
Your team is the one other teams want to join.
You've earned the trust of engineers, PMs, designers, and leadership - because you deliver.
How You Operate
No blame games. Something broke? Fix it, learn from it, ship the post-mortem, move on.
Customer-first thinking, not ego-first. The right answer wins - even if it wasn't yours.
Strong opinions, weakly held. You'll change your mind when the data says so.
You don't wait for permission to lead. You see the gap, you close it.
Customers > Org > Team > Self.
That's the order. In that order. Always.
What We're Not
We're not corporate. We're not politics. We don't do fluff.
We don't do performance theater. We do performance.
We don't track hours. But when production breaks or a launch is on the line, we show up.
Bonus Points
Experience building inboxes, messaging, communication, or collaboration products.
Familiarity with our stack: Vue.js, Node.js, Go, GCP, Kubernetes, Firestore, MongoDB, ClickHouse, ElasticSearch.
You've shipped omnichannel or multi-channel systems (SMS, Email, WhatsApp, etc.) before.
You've taken a 0→1 product to scale - or rebuilt one mid-flight without breaking it.