Sr. Engineering Manager - Commerce
HighLevel
IndiaremotePosted 1 month ago
Skill Required
Engineering-ManagementSoftware-Engineering-ManagementBackend-EngineeringPayments-EngineeringTechnology-LeadershipE-Commerce-Engineering-ManagerEngineering-ManagerTechnical-Lead-Manager-CommerceEngineering ManagerEngineeringsoftware engineeringSystem DesignBackup and RecoveryMicroservicesObservabilityKubernetesautomationFirebasesecuritybuildinggRPCMongoDBTestNGdesignRedisCI/CDCloudGCPandGoCICDAIFulltime
Key highlights
- Required experience: 12+ years backend distributed systems (5+ years Go)
- Management experience: 5+ years managing software engineering teams
- Key Requirement: Experience with GCP services and Kubernetes/GKE
- Work Environment: Global, remote-first organization
Role overview
HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that provides agencies, entrepreneurs, and SMBs with the infrastructure to build, automate, and scale. Operating as a global, remote-first organization, the platform supports over 1 million businesses across 150+ countries, powering billions of API hits and message events daily. We're looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the team building HighLevel's Payments Platform. This hands-on technical leadership role involves owning the execution, reliability, and evolution of the platform powering checkout, subscriptions, payment orchestration, invoicing, and financial reconciliation at scale, while partnering closely with Product, Design, Finance, Support, Infrastructure, and other engineering teams.
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, and Multi-region failover
- Champion production excellence through: SLO ownership, Error budgets, Incident management, Disaster recovery planning, Capacity planning, and 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, and 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, and 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
- Manage team growth, hiring, mentoring, and performance management
- Handle career development and succession planning
- Cultivate an engineering culture focused on ownership and continuous improvement
- Oversee end-to-end execution of Payments Platform initiatives
- Manage cross-functional roadmap planning and prioritization
- Ensure delivery predictability across multiple workstreams
- Lead platform architecture evolution in partnership with senior technical leaders
- Manage reliability strategy including SLIs, SLOs, capacity planning, and incident management
- Oversee API governance, data lifecycle management, and operational excellence
- Handle product roadmap planning and execution
- Provide executive communication and engineering updates
- Collaborate cross-functionally across Product, Infrastructure, Finance, Compliance, Support, and Security
- Manage competing priorities while balancing customer outcomes and technical investments
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
Additional details
- HighLevel operates as a global, remote-first organization
- The company is an Equal Opportunity Employer
- Demographic information requested for compliance with government recordkeeping, reporting, and other legal requirements is voluntary
- Originally posted on Himalayas
