Lead Engineer - AI Studio
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 Lead Software Engineer to join our AI Studio Team, the group responsible for building AI Studio - an AI-based React application builder that generates production-ready websites and other React applications from natural language, which users can then connect to custom domains and publish live to the internet - from prompt-driven app generation, component and layout creation, automated copy/design generation, real-time preview and editing, to one-click deployment across our product ecosystem.
This team owns the intelligence layer that helps millions of SMBs build production-ready websites and React applications without technical expertise. The AI Studio platform orchestrates complex workflows across data processing, LLM-powered reasoning, code and component generation, design generation, and live deployment to custom domains. With millions of applications and billions of visitor interactions flowing through our systems, reliability, correctness, and performance are mission-critical.
Responsibilities
Own architecture and scaling decisions for core AI Studio platform components (e.g., App Generation Engine, React Build & Render Pipeline, Domain & Publishing Pipeline, AI Content Systems)
Lead design and implementation of cross-cutting initiatives to improve system responsiveness, generation accuracy, and platform robustness
Build scalable, fault-tolerant LLM pipelines for content generation, layout creation, experimentation, and AI-driven user guidance
Work hands-on with technologies like Go, NestJS, Node, PostgreSQL, Firestore, Vector Databases, Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare KV, and microservices
Design distributed systems that handle high-throughput generative and analytical workloads while ensuring correctness and low latency
Build and optimize embeddings pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and multi-agent orchestration frameworks
Drive improvements in observability using Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and structured logging
Establish and maintain SLOs for generation latency, correctness, model safety, and system uptime
Strengthen resiliency and failover strategies to ensure seamless user experiences during traffic spikes and model load variations
Implement hallucination mitigation strategies (code constraints, structured outputs, model verification layers, retrieval guards, test scaffolding)
Collaborate with infra and security to enforce data governance, access control, privacy boundaries, and compliance around user-generated data
Leverage LLMs and AI tools to write, test, and debug code - while driving standards that ensure reliability and consistency across engineering teams
Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and pairing, leading by influence to promote technical excellence, code quality, and a high-ownership culture (this is an individual contributor role with no direct reports)
Partner with PMs, designers, and other engineering leaders to define long-term roadmap and deliver high-performing AI-powered application-building features
Participate in reviews, deep dives, and on-call rotations to maintain a culture of accountability and operational excellence
As a Lead Engineer, you will drive the technical direction for our AI-driven application-builder architecture, lead complex system design decisions, and serve as a hands-on technical leader and mentor for the engineers building AI Studio’s app generation engine, React website/app builder, design and component systems, domain publishing pipeline, and AI Agents. This is a hands-on individual contributor role - you’ll spend the majority of your time designing systems and writing production code - while partnering closely with product, infra, and design to shape the roadmap, raise engineering standards, and deliver intuitive, generative, high-performance user experiences at scale.
Architecture & Platform Ownership
AI & Distributed Systems Engineering
Quality, Observability & Reliability
AI Guardrails, Safety & Tooling
Technical Leadership & Collaboration
Requirements
6+ years of backend engineering experience, including distributed system design and high-scale platform development
Strong proficiency in Go (Golang) for building high-performance, concurrent backend services, alongside Node/NestJS experience
Hands-on experience building and operating edge/serverless services with Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare KV (or comparable edge compute and distributed key-value stores)
Deep expertise in event-driven architectures, asynchronous workflows, and high-throughput data pipelines.
Strong command of relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL data models, query optimization, and complex transactional data
Fluency in LLM integrations, vector search, embeddings, RAG patterns, and generative AI frameworks
Familiarity with frontend architecture using Vue, and a solid understanding of UI/UX principles
Experience with monitoring, alerting, and incident response for production systems
Strong instincts for scaling, latency optimization, and reliability under real-world load
Experience implementing structured generation, verification layers, retrieval-based grounding, and guardrails to reduce hallucinations
Understanding of prompt engineering patterns, context injection, and model evaluation
Exceptional communication and cross-functional leadership capabilities
Pragmatic decision-making with a balance of long-term vision and iterative execution