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 Go5+ years of experience managing software engineering teams delivering large-scale backend platformsProven experience leading teams responsible for business-critical distributed systems with high availability and reliability requirementsExperience partnering with Product Managers and cross-functional stakeholders to define roadmaps, manage priorities, and deliver customer-facing capabilitiesStrong track record of hiring, coaching, mentoring, and growing engineering talentDeep understanding of distributed systems including event-driven architectures, asynchronous messaging, consistency models, idempotency, concurrency control, and resilience patternsExperience with Kubernetes/GKE, GCP services (Pub/Sub, Redis, MongoDB/Firestore, ClickHouse), CI/CD, and cloud-native infrastructureStrong understanding of API lifecycle management including protobuf, ConnectRPC/gRPC, versioning strategies, and contract testingExperience driving engineering operational excellence through SLIs/SLOs, observability, incident management, disaster recovery, and capacity planningFamiliarity with security and compliance best practices including PCI, secrets management, data governance, and privacy controlsExcellent 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 managementCareer development and succession planningEngineering culture focused on ownership and continuous improvement

Platform DeliveryEnd-to-end execution of Payments Platform initiativesCross-functional roadmap planning and prioritizationDelivery predictability across multiple workstreams

Technical ExcellencePlatform architecture evolution in partnership with senior technical leadersReliability strategy including SLIs, SLOs, capacity planning, and incident managementAPI governance, data lifecycle management, and operational excellence

Stakeholder ManagementProduct roadmap planning and executionExecutive communication and engineering updatesCross-functional collaboration across Product, Infrastructure, Finance, Compliance, Support, and SecurityManaging competing priorities while balancing customer outcomes and technical investments
Responsibilities:

• Lead and Grow a High-Performing Engineering Team:Build, mentor, and scale a high-performing team of backend engineersCreate an environment of ownership, accountability, continuous learning, and technical excellenceCoach engineers through regular feedback, career development, performance management, and growth planningDrive hiring strategy, interview quality, onboarding, and succession planningFoster engineering best practices through design reviews, code quality, technical mentorship, and knowledge sharing
• Drive Execution & Delivery:Own execution for the Payments Platform roadmap, ensuring predictable delivery across multiple concurrent initiativesBalance business priorities with long-term platform investments, technical debt reduction, and reliability improvementsCoordinate cross-team dependencies while proactively identifying risks, blockers, and execution gapsLead sprint planning, roadmap planning, estimation, prioritization, and delivery reviewsEnsure engineering teams consistently deliver high-quality, maintainable software
• Partner with Cross-functional Stakeholders:Work closely with Product, Finance, Compliance, Customer Success, Marketing, Infrastructure, and Security teams to translate business objectives into technical roadmapsCommunicate engineering tradeoffs, delivery timelines, risks, and technical decisions to executive stakeholdersAlign multiple engineering teams around shared architectural decisions, platform capabilities, and operational goalsDrive roadmap planning while balancing customer impact, platform scalability, and engineering investments
• Own Platform Reliability & Operational Excellence:Lead the team responsible for highly available, planet-scale payment infrastructure including checkout, subscriptions, payment orchestration, invoicing, ledger, and reconciliation servicesEnsure the team designs resilient distributed systems using patterns such as:

IdempotencyRetry strategiesCircuit breakersSaga/Outbox patternsGraceful degradationMulti-region failoverChampion production excellence through:

SLO ownershipError budgetsIncident managementDisaster recovery planningCapacity planningOperational readiness reviews

• Drive Technical Strategy:Partner with Staff and Principal Engineers to evolve platform architecture and technical directionGuide architectural decisions around:

Domain Driven DesignAPI governanceEvent-driven systemsService boundariesData consistency modelsEnsure engineering teams maintain strong engineering standards for API lifecycle management, schema evolution, observability, security, and platform reliabilityLead technical planning while balancing scalability, maintainability, delivery speed, and operational cost

• Champion Engineering Excellence:Establish engineering standards for:

API designCode qualityTesting strategyCI/CDDocumentationOperational readinessPromote a strong engineering culture through design reviews, RFCs, ADRs, postmortems, and continuous improvement initiativesDrive adoption of developer productivity improvements including service templates, automated testing, observability, and deployment tooling