Staff Engineer – Distributed Data Systems & Infrastructure
HighLevel
IndiaremotePosted 2 days ago
Skill Required
Software-EngineerData-Platform-EngineerInfrastructure-EngineerStaff-Data-EngineerData-EngineerStaff-Infrastructure-EngineerSenior-Data-Infrastructure-EngineerStaff-Database-EngineerStaff-Platform-EngineerStaff-Systems-EngineerStaff-EngineerData EngineerInfrastructure Engineersoftware engineeringSystem DesignDesign SystemMicroservicesEngineeringPostgreSQLanalyticalautomationCassandradesigningDynamoDBbuildingMongoDBdesignMySQLSQLandAIFulltime
Key highlights
- Required experience: 9+ years of software engineering
- Role level: Staff Engineer
- Work environment: Global, remote-first
- Key requirement: Experience with multi-terabyte datasets and 30K-50K+ ops/sec
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, managing massive scale with over 4 billion API hits and 2.5 billion message events daily. We are looking for an exceptional Staff Engineer to shape the architecture and evolution of our data infrastructure. This role is for a strong individual contributor who can design systems, build infrastructure capabilities, challenge architectural limitations, and drive technical initiatives to improve scalability, reliability, performance, and infrastructure economics across multiple engineering teams.
Responsibilities
- Architect for scale: Design and evolve distributed data architectures capable of supporting significant growth in traffic, data volume, and engineering complexity.
- Build infrastructure platforms: Develop reusable infrastructure components, frameworks, and platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to build scalable systems.
- Drive architectural evolution: Identify fundamental limitations in existing systems and lead large-scale initiatives involving data distribution, sharding, replication, migrations, and architectural modernization.
- Shape technical strategy: Influence database technology choices, architectural patterns, and long-term infrastructure direction across the company.
- Improve infrastructure economics: Lead engineering initiatives that materially improve scalability, resource efficiency, and infrastructure costs.
- Engineer for reliability: Design systems that remain available and resilient under high throughput, infrastructure failures, and changing workload patterns.
- Create organizational leverage: Establish engineering standards and reusable solutions that eliminate recurring problems across teams.
- Lead through technical influence: Work with senior engineers and engineering leadership to turn ambiguous, company-level challenges into executable technical programs.
Requirements
- 9+ years of strong software engineering experience, including significant hands-on experience designing and building distributed systems, backend infrastructure, or large-scale data platforms, with demonstrated Staff-level technical impact.
- Strong software engineering background with experience designing and building production infrastructure, not only operating or administering it.
- Experience architecting systems handling multi-terabyte datasets and 30K–50K+ operations per second, or comparable large-scale distributed workloads.
- Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts, including partitioning, sharding, replication, consistency, concurrency, fault tolerance, and data distribution.
- Strong hands-on experience with both relational and NoSQL database architectures, including their design principles, scalability characteristics, and trade-offs.
- Experience leading complex architectural initiatives involving multiple systems and engineering teams.
- Ability to identify systemic technical problems and design solutions that improve infrastructure across the organization.
- Strong technical judgment, ownership, and the ability to influence architectural decisions without formal authority.
- Previous ownership of challenging infrastructure problems where the solution required more than improving an individual service or database.
- Experience designing or significantly evolving distributed architectures, building infrastructure adopted by multiple teams, leading complex technical transformations, or enabling systems to operate at substantially greater scale.
- Ability to be equally comfortable discussing database internals, distributed systems trade-offs, and long-term architecture as working with engineers to turn those decisions into production systems.
Nice to have
- Strong experience with relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, combined with experience in one or more distributed database technologies such as MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, or similar systems.
- Experience with distributed SQL, search infrastructure, analytical databases, or other large-scale storage systems.
Additional details
- HighLevel is a global, remote-first organization.
- The company values engineering depth and architectural understanding over familiarity with a long list of technologies.
- The company does not expect expertise in any particular combination of database products; the ability to understand internals, evaluate trade-offs, and design scalable infrastructure is what matters.
- Impact is measured by the systems enabled, architectural problems eliminated, and engineering capabilities left behind.
- EEO Statement: The company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. As an employer subject to affirmative action regulations, we invite you to voluntarily provide the following demographic information. This information is used solely for compliance with government recordkeeping, reporting, and other legal requirements. Providing this information is voluntary and refusal to do so will not affect your application status. This data will be kept separate from your application and will not be used in the hiring decision.
- Applicants are encouraged to review the Privacy Policy before submitting their application.
- Originally posted on Himalayas.