Software Development Engineer II (Backend) - Contacts
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 Our Team:
Our platform enables customers to create over 400 million new entities every day and
perform 35 million search operations daily across billions of records. We build and maintain highly scalable backend systems and distributed services that operate with extremely low latency and high reliability.
If you’re passionate about building scalable backend systems and solving engineering challenges at scale, you’ll find exciting opportunities on our team.
About the Role:
The Contacts Team sits at the heart of HighLevel’s CRM platform and powers contact
management capabilities consumed across workflows, conversations, campaigns, opportunities, integrations, and other product surfaces.
We are looking for an SDE-2 Backend Engineer who enjoys building scalable backend
services and solving real-world engineering problems around APIs, data processing, reliability, and performance.
You will work alongside senior engineers to design and build backend services while gradually taking independent ownership of services and features from development through production.
What We Expect:
- Strong ownership of backend services and features from development through production.
- Ability to independently design, develop, test, and deploy scalable backend solutions.
- Passion for writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- A collaborative mindset with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, and infrastructure teams.
- Focus on improving performance, scalability, reliability, and developer productivity.
Key Responsibilities:
- Design, develop, test, and maintain scalable backend services using Node.js and TypeScript.
- Build and maintain REST APIs consumed by multiple HighLevel products and services.
- Write clean, maintainable, testable, and production-quality code.
- Work with high-volume datasets and optimize database queries and data-access patterns.
- Develop asynchronous processing flows using queues and event-driven architecture.
- Identify API and database performance bottlenecks.
- Work with caching, indexing, batching, and asynchronous processing patterns.
- Contribute toward improving service latency, throughput, and scalability.
- Understand how application design impacts systems operating under high request volumes.
- Monitor production services and investigate failures using logs, metrics, traces, and observability platforms.
- Debug and resolve production issues.
- Participate in on-call and incident-resolution processes.
- Contribute to root-cause analysis and sustainable fixes instead of short-term patches.
- Write unit/integration tests for new functionality.
- Participate actively in code reviews.
- Follow secure coding and engineering best practices.
- Improve existing code through refactoring and technical-debt reduction.
Backend Engineering
Performance & Scalability
Reliability & Production Ownership
Engineering Quality
Required Skills & Experience:
- 3+ years of backend development experience.
- Strong hands-on experience with Node.js and TypeScript/JavaScript.
- Experience designing and consuming REST APIs.
- Good understanding of microservices.
- Experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases.
- Understanding of database indexing and query optimization.
- Familiarity with asynchronous processing and message queues.
- Experience with Git, CI/CD and automated testing.
- Familiarity with Docker.
- Exposure to AWS/GCP or another major cloud platform.
- Strong debugging and problem-solving skills.
Nice to have:
- Experience working on high-scale SaaS products.
- Redis or similar caching technologies.
- Elasticsearch/OpenSearch.
- Kafka, Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ or similar messaging systems.
- Kubernetes
- Observability platforms such as Grafana, Sentry, ELK or equivalent.
Why Join Highlevel:
- Build products used by millions of businesses worldwide.
- Solve challenging engineering problems at internet scale.
- Work with modern technologies in a highly distributed architecture.
- Be part of a remote-first engineering organization that values ownership, innovation, and continuous learning.
- Opportunity to build systems handling billions of API requests and message events every day