Sr. Engineering Manager - Commerce
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:
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Lead and Grow a High-Performing Engineering Team:
- Drive Execution & Delivery:
- Partner with Cross-functional Stakeholders:
- Own Platform Reliability & Operational Excellence:
- Drive Technical Strategy:
- Champion Engineering Excellence: