Backend Engineer - Conversations

About High Level

High Level is an AI-powered business operating system that gives agencies, entrepreneurs and SMBs the infrastructure to build, automate and scale. Today, High Level supports SMBs across 150+ countries, fueling community-driven growth rooted in real customer outcomes. To date, businesses operating on High Level have generated over $7 billion in ecosystem value, demonstrating the impact of shared infrastructure  centralizing conversations, automation and intelligence into one system, we help businesses move faster, reduce complexity and execute efficiently.

Behind the platform, High Level 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.

With over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries, High Level 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.

Every month, High Level 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.

We’re hiring a Staff Engineer – Backend (Data Systems) to own and evolve the data backbone that powers messaging at scale inside High Level’s Conversations platform.

You’ll design, operate, and scale systems that handle billions of documents across Mongo

DB, Firestore, Redis, and Elastic Search — with reliability, predictability, and engineering clarity as non-negotiables.

This is a hands‑on IC role — you’ll code, design, review, and guide. You’ll set the standard for how we think about databases, APIs, and engineering craft.

The goal: make our data systems boring in the best possible way — predictable, fast, and easy to trust.

Your first project will be to re‑architect and scale Elastic Search to handle billions of documents efficiently while setting best practices for schema design, observability, and testing discipline across the org.

You’ll join the Conversations team — the core communication platform at High Level that powers SMS, Email, Whats App, and DMs for millions of users.

The system processes 2B+ messages monthly, spanning 50+ workloads and thousands of pods across GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks).

The data stack includes Mongo

DB, Firestore, Redis, Elastic Search, and Click House — distributed, high-volume, and mission‑critical.

This role sits at the intersection of data architecture and engineering culture — scaling systems while shaping how engineers design, test, and reason about them.

• Database architecture: Redesign and optimize data models, queries, and indexing strategies across Mongo
  
  DB, Firestore, and Elastic Search
• Search at scale: Own Elastic Search reliability — ingestion, indexing, shard strategy, and query performance for billions of documents
• Reliability & performance: Eliminate bottlenecks, improve replication health, and enforce predictable query and index latency
• System design: Define data flow and integration boundaries between storage, cache, and APIs with clear contracts and fault isolation
• Observability: Build visibility into every data path — metrics, traces, slow query logs, replication lag, and cluster health dashboards
• Testing & quality: Make testing non‑negotiable — enforce unit, integration, and load testing standards across all backend modules
• Engineering culture: Drive RFCs, ADRs, and design reviews that push clarity and precision. Codify patterns that make good engineering repeatable
• Hands‑on leadership: Write code, design systems, and debug production issues. Lead by technical example, not by delegation
• Mentorship & influence: Level up engineers around you — reviews…