Staff Backend Engineer - Phone Billing

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 Team

We're looking for a Staff Engineer to lead the technical direction and evolution of Phone Billing, one of the most critical components of HighLevel's communication platform. Phone Billing sits at the intersection of product usage, infrastructure, and revenue - it is responsible for accurately metering and monetising usage across LC Phone products, including voice, messages, phone numbers, and other communication services.

The scale and criticality of this system make billing correctness non-negotiable. Every communication event can have a financial implication, and a single billing error can impact revenue, customer trust, and financial reconciliation at the same time. The platform processes 100M+ events daily across 15+ services, with billing workflows that need to remain accurate and reliable despite retries, duplicate events, delayed events, provider inconsistencies, partial failures, and continuously evolving pricing models.

As a Staff Engineer, you'll own the architecture, scalability, reliability, and technical strategy of the Phone Billing platform. You'll solve complex distributed-systems problems around usage metering, rating, charging, idempotency, reconciliation, credits, refunds, adjustments, provider cost tracking, and billing lifecycle management. You'll also drive the architectural evolution required to support significantly higher volumes without compromising financial accuracy or system performance.

A key part of the role will be building billing systems that are correct by design - ensuring that every billable event is accounted for exactly once from a business perspective, even when the underlying infrastructure operates with retries, at-least-once delivery, asynchronous processing, and failures. You'll establish robust reconciliation mechanisms between HighLevel's internal usage data, provider-level usage, and customer invoices, with strong observability and auditability to quickly identify and resolve discrepancies.

You'll work closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, Finance, and other Staff Engineers to define pricing and billing architecture, while partnering across Phone, WhatsApp, CPaaS, and provider-integration teams. You'll influence technical decisions beyond a single team, establish engineering standards, identify systemic technical debt, and drive long-term improvements in reliability, cost efficiency, data architecture, and operational excellence.

The broader Phone Core ecosystem includes CPaaS platform services, Trust & Compliance, and phone number provisioning, giving this role significant architectural influence across the communication platform. Your primary focus, however, will be making Phone Billing a highly scalable, financially accurate, resilient, observable, and extensible platform capable of supporting the next 10x growth of HighLevel's communication business.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-endtechnical health of Phone Billing - proactively identify architectural bottlenecks, correctness and reliability risks, and technical debt; define and drive the roadmap to improve billing accuracy, reconciliation, scalability, observability, and cost efficiency as the platform scales to 10x its current volume.

• Drive 1-2 high-impact initiatives end-to-end - take ownership from problem definition and technical discovery through architecture, implementation, rollout, and measurement, ensuring the initiatives deliver measurable improvements to Phone Billing in areas such as accuracy, reliability, scalability, or cost efficiency.

• Architect for massive scale: Own the high-level architecture and scaling decisions for core Phone platform components, including CPaaS abstractions, provider adapters, and shared messaging/voice APIs that support billions of monthly events.

• Own Phone Billing end to end: usage metering, rating, reserve/commit lifecycle, idempotency, reconciliation, and audit trails for the Phone channels - with zero tolerance for double-charging or lost usage

• Lead the evolution of Revenue Growth into a configuration-driven, rules-based platform that adapts to new regulatory and carrier requirements without invasive engineering change

• Work hands-on with technologies like NestJS, Firestore, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Queuing Systems, Data Warehousing Systems and Service Mesh-based microservices

• Drive high-concurrency innovation: Lead the design and execution of cross-cutting initiatives to improve reliability, latency, and throughput across time-sensitive APIs and workflows serving millions of businesses.

• Drive observability and resilience by evolving our monitoring, alerting (Prometheus/Grafana), and incident response strategies - including the financial invariants that must be alerted on, not just the technical ones

• Leverage LLMs and AI tools to write, refactor, test, and debug code efficiently - while implementing guardrails to reduce hallucination and boost reliability

• Partner with product, infra, security, finance and legal teams to ensure data integrity, access control, and compliance across phone services

• Develop EM I leaders and senior engineers, build leadership pipeline, succession planning and raise the hiring bar

• Participate in design reviews, deep dives, and on-call rotations to support a high-bar culture of accountability and operational excellence

Requirements

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience with 2+ years of Staff role, with a proven track record of designing fault-tolerant systems that operate at a scale of billions of hits or events.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and asynchronous job processing
• Demonstrated experience building systems where correctness is non-negotiable - metering, ledgers, billing, payments, or comparable transactional domains - with a working grasp of idempotency, exactly-once semantics, and reconciliation
• Proven experience optimizing availability, performance, and reliability in real-world systems under load
• Strong experience with relational and NoSQL data models (especially with complex transactional data)
• Experience designing policy- or rules-driven systems that evolve with external requirements rather than hard-coding them
• Familiarity with monitoring, SLOs, and root-cause analysis in production environments
• Familiarity with hallucination mitigation strategies (e.g., code constraints, test scaffolding, embeddings, context injection)
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, including with Finance, Legal and external partners
• A pragmatic, hands-on leader who balances long-term vision with iterative execution

Preferred Skills

• Experience with usage-based billing or metering engines in a high-volume product, specifically managing millions of transactional events per hour.

• Exposure to telecom trust and compliance regimes - 10DLC, toll-free verification, TCPA/TSR, DLT, carrier filtering or number portability

• Experience building provider-agnostic integration layers across multiple third-party vendors

• Experience working with AI Tools, Communication APIs (Twilio, Plivo etc)

• Contributions to open-source tools, internal platforms, or engineering blogs