GoHighLevel - Staff Software Engineer - Payments & Commerce Platform

About The Role :

Were building a global commerce platform to power $1T+ in annual transactions for millions of SMEs.

Our SDE V (Staff) is the technical force multiplier who sets the architecture , raises the reliability bar , and multiplies team effectiveness .

Youll steward our core payments models subscriptions, payments , reconciliation , tax and the services around them, ensuring correctness by design, auditability, and delightful performance at scale .

This is an IC role with org level influence (no direct reports), focused on designing systems, shaping standards, and growing engineers.

Stack : Backend : Go, ConnectRPC, Buf.

Frontend : Vue.js , Vite, Webpack MFA, TanStack Query.

Databases : MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse.

Cloud : GCP (GKE), Pub/Sub, Redis, OpenTelemetry.

What Youll Do :

- Architect and ship multi tenant, planet scale services (checkout, subscriptions, payments orchestration, invoicing, tax hooks) with clear domain boundaries (DDD) and hard SLOs.

- Be the custodian of API & schema design : own protobuf/ConnectRPC conventions, versioning policy, deprecation playbooks, and Buf breaking change checksso our contracts stand the test of time.

- Guarantee resilience & availability of core payment paths : timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, idempotency keys, outbox/Saga patterns, hedged requests, and graceful degradation.

- Ensure complete auditability : append only double entry ledger, immutable event streams, trace linked entities (OTel trace/span IDs), tamper evident trails, and reconciliations that tie out to the cent.

- Own error boundaries end to end : enumerate failure domains (PSP, network, data, concurrency, quota, browser, device); design uniform error contracts; implement compensations/backfills and automated replay.

- Keep track of every deployed thing : services, workers, triggers, cron, subscriptionsown the service catalog and scorecards (owners, SLOs, runbooks, PDBs, HPA/VPA, budgets, quotas, timeouts).

- Configuration & limits stewardship : enforce sane defaults across GKE, Pub/Sub, Redis, Firestore/Mongo, ClickHouseconnection pools, ack deadlines, batch sizes, TTLs, memory/FD limits, and GCP quotas.

- Observability as a product : pervasive OpenTelemetry, RED/USE metrics, exemplars, trace sampling, SLO dashboards, and alerting that wakes humans only for user impacting issues.

- Production excellence : canary/blue green rollouts, automated rollbacks, chaos drills, DR playbooks (RPO/RTO), multi region failover strategies, and incident command on rotation.

- Security & compliance by design : PCI scope minimization, tokenization/vaulting, secrets/KMS hygiene, data retention/archival, and privacy controlsembed checks in CI/CD.

- Developer acceleration : pave golden paths (service templates, ADR/RFC process, linting/formatting, contract tests, ephemeral envs, load/perf harnesses) to make the right thing the easy thing.

What Youll Lead :

- Core domain evolution : orchestration ledger reconciliation flows with crisp invariants and consistency guarantees (read your writes where needed, eventual where appropriate).

- Reliability strategy : SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, cost/FinOps guardrails, multi region posture, and DR exercises.

- API & data governance : canonical models, schema lifecycle (compatibility matrix, migrations), data lifecycle (retention, archival, compliance).

- Practice leadership for HighLevel : design reviews, postmortems, technical strategy, coding standards, and mentorship across teamsraise the bar for the org.

- Hiring & team growth : help us hire, scale, and train the right team; shape interview loops, rubrics, onboarding, and ongoing learning (brown bags, reviews, pair design).

- Cross functional partnership : collaborate with Product/Marketing/Support to translate platform capabilities and constraints into roadmaps, GTM narratives, and reliable customer outcomes.

- Risk & roadmap : maintain a technical risk register, make build vs buy calls, and propose simplifications or deprecations that meaningfully reduce complexity and MTTR.

Minimum Qualifications :

- 10+ years building and operating backend systems (at least 5+ years in Go), with 23+ years acting as a Staff/Principal level IC or Tech Lead for critical paths.

- Deep proficiency with protobuf + ConnectRPC/gRPC and API lifecycle management (versioning, compatibility, contract testing, Buf).

- Distributed systems fundamentals : idempotency, exactly once ish via dedupe/outbox, ordering, consensus basics, backpressure, concurrency control.

- Event driven architectures on GCP (Pub/Sub), plus Redis for fast paths; strong schema design in MongoDB/Firestore and analytics/reporting patterns on ClickHouse.

- Kubernetes/GKE operations at scale : autoscaling (HPA/VPA), PDBs, resource limits/requests, multi region topologies, CI/CD, canary/blue green.

- Reliability engineering : SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity & load testing, incident management, DR/BCP.

- Security & compliance : secrets/KMS best practices, PCI basics (scope reduction, key rotation), and data governance (retention/archival).

- Testing discipline : unit, integration, contract, property based, performance; test data management and deterministic environments.

- Frontend collaboration : solid understanding of Vue.js + TanStack Query to shape clean API surfaces and performance budgets across the boundary.

- Exceptional technical writing & communication : design docs, ADRs/RFCs, postmortems, and stakeholder updates.

Nice to have :

- Hands on integrations with major PSPs/local rails (e.g., UPI, wallets, BNPL, cards/3DS2) and reconciliation at scale.

- Experience with active active or multi region designs; chaos engineering; traffic management.

- Observability leadership with OpenTelemetry at org scale (tail based sampling, exemplars).

- FinOps experience : cost baselining, quotas, budget alarms, and workload right sizing.

- Familiarity with regulatory frameworks (PCI DSS, SOC 2/ISO 27001) and privacy laws relevant to our markets.

How We Work :

- Pragmatic architecture with a bias to ship, measure, iterate.

- High ownership, low ego : design docs, incident reviews, data driven decisions.

- Product first mindset : we sweat the merchant and buyer experience.

- IC leadership : influence through design, docs, prototypes, and mentorshipnot headcount.