Principal Engineer (Go)

Location: Remote-first global organization; no specific candidate location stated.

Company

HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system providing infrastructure for agencies, entrepreneurs, and small and medium-sized businesses across more than 150 countries.

What you will do

• Architect and ship multi-tenant, planet-scale commerce services covering checkout, subscriptions, payment orchestration, invoicing, and tax.
• Own domain models, protobuf and ConnectRPC API conventions, schema lifecycle, compatibility policies, and contract governance.
• Design resilient payment and distributed-system workflows using idempotency, retries, circuit breakers, outbox and Saga patterns, reconciliation, and graceful degradation.
• Establish auditability, observability, SLOs, incident response, disaster recovery, multi-region failover, and production excellence practices.
• Set platform standards for Kubernetes/GKE, Pub/Sub, Redis, Firestore, MongoDB, ClickHouse, CI/CD, security, compliance, and FinOps.
• Lead technical strategy through design reviews, postmortems, mentoring, hiring, interview standards, and cross-functional roadmap development.

Requirements

• 10+ years building and operating backend systems, including at least 5+ years with Go and 2–3+ years at Staff, Principal, or Tech Lead level.
• Deep expertise in protobuf, ConnectRPC/gRPC, API lifecycle management, versioning, compatibility, contract testing, and Buf.
• Strong distributed-systems knowledge, including idempotency, deduplication, ordering, backpressure, concurrency control, and event-driven architecture.
• Experience with GCP Pub/Sub, Redis, MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse, Kubernetes/GKE, autoscaling, multi-region topologies, and canary or blue-green deployments.
• Background in reliability engineering, testing, incident management, disaster recovery, security, PCI fundamentals, data governance, and technical documentation.
• Ability to collaborate across backend and frontend boundaries, including familiarity with Vue.js and TanStack Query.

Nice to have

• Experience integrating payment service providers and local payment rails such as UPI, wallets, BNPL, cards, and 3DS2.
• Experience with active-active or multi-region systems, chaos engineering, traffic management, and OpenTelemetry at organizational scale.
• FinOps experience covering cost baselines, quotas, budget alarms, and workload right-sizing.
• Familiarity with PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and privacy regulations.

Culture & Benefits

• Global, remote-first organization with more than 2,000 team members across 10+ countries.
• Autonomous environment focused on initiative, ownership, clarity, and execution.
• Individual contributor role with organization-level influence and no direct reports.
• Opportunity to shape engineering standards, architecture, reliability practices, and developer workflows across teams.