Staff Engineer - Workflows Engine

About HighLevel:HighLevel is an AI-powered business operating system that gives agencies, entrepreneurs and SMBs the infrastructure to build, automate and scale. Today, HighLevel supports SMBs across 150+ countries, fueling community-driven growth rooted in real customer outcomes. To date, businesses operating on HighLevel have generated over $7 billion in ecosystem value, demonstrating the impact of shared infrastructure at scale. By centralizing conversations, automation and intelligence into one system, we help businesses move faster, reduce complexity and execute efficiently. Behind the platform, HighLevel 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. Our people With over 2,000 team members across 10+ countries, HighLevel 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. Our impact Every month, HighLevel 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. Learn more about us on our YouTube Channel or Blog Posts     Role Summary: We’re hiring a Staff Engineer – Workflows (Engine) to own and evolve the orchestration layer that powers automation at scale within HighLevel. You’ll rebuild the engine that drives 80M+ workflow enrolments per day and nearly 1 Billion action executions per day at peak load — with reliability, performance, and clarity at its core.   You’ll operate as a hands-on individual contributor, designing and writing core engine logic in Go and Node.js, while defining contracts, reliability guarantees, and scaling patterns. This is a Staff Architect track role — deep technical ownership, not management. You’ll have decision authority on engine architecture and are expected to set the gold standard for how distributed systems are built at HighLevel’s automation team.   Team & Project Overview: You’ll join the Workflows (Engine) team — a small, autonomous group of top-tier engineers within the Workflows organization. The team’s mission is to build the next-generation orchestration engine that powers all automations at HighLevel: reliable, testable, and ready for future expansion.   This engine handles concurrency, ordering, retries, and scaling under unpredictable load. Your rewrite will make the system more robust, easier to extend with new actions and context types, and dramatically simpler to maintain. Ultimately, your work will enable faster feature delivery across the entire automation platform.   Day to day, you’ll work closely with the Engineering Manager (Workflows) and a Lead Engineer from Workflow Core — operating as the founding engineer for the new Engine org. Responsibilities:

Re-architecture: Rebuild the Workflow Engine from Node.js to Go, creating a modular, high-performance foundation for billions of executions

Core abstractions: Design orchestration, state, retries, and execution guarantees with clear contracts and isolation boundaries

Performance model: Optimise for throughput-first execution while maintaining strict ordering within each workflow execution context

APIs & contracts: Define interfaces and schemas between Engine, Triggers, and Actions. Ensure consistent, reliable, and versioned communication

Reliability & observability: Partner with SRE to instrument metrics (latency, throughput, failure rate) and build replay and diagnostics tooling

Operational ownership: Own the engine’s runtime — incidents, RCA, and prevention. Deliver measurable reliability improvements (<1% failures/day)

Migration & rollout: Drive dual-run migration with progressive rollout and auto-rollback safety

Engineering culture: Set the technical benchmark for clarity, testability, and performance within Workflows and beyond

Requirements:

10+ years of backend engineering experience with deep hands-on work in distributed systems, job schedulers, or orchestration engines

Advanced proficiency in Go (preferred) and Node.js, with experience writing low-latency, high-throughput microservices

Strong understanding of testability and isolation principles; you design systems that are easy to test, reason about, and extend

Production-grade database experience (MongoDB, Firestore, or equivalent) with sound data modelling

Cloud experience (GCP, AWS, or Azure), especially event-driven services like Pub/Sub, SQS, or Cloud Tasks

Proven record of measurable performance wins — reduced p95/p99 latency, improved throughput, or increased reliability

Strong fundamentals in concurrency, idempotency, ordering guarantees, and fault tolerance

Pragmatic engineering mindset — simplicity and clarity over abstraction for abstraction’s sake

Strong applied understanding of design patterns and system architecture principles — able to model orchestration, state, and retries using proven, scalable patterns

Good to have:

Experience with automation systems (e.g., n8n, Zapier-like architectures) and the ability to generalize such models

Observability experience (Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Kibana)

Strong debugging and performance profiling skills

Open-source contributions or technical writing in distributed systems

Experience helping define engineering best practices or building early-stage teams