[Hiring] Engineering Manager - Conversations @HighLevel

Role Description

We're going to replace the inbox. All of it. Gmail. Outlook. Front. Every single-channel and omnichannel inbox out there.

Conversations is the most-used surface in HighLevel — the page where our customers spend the majority of their day. Every SMS, email, WhatsApp, DM, and call lands here. It's where deals get closed, customers get answered, and businesses get run.

We want to make it the only inbox a business will ever need. That's the bar. And you'll lead the team building it.

The Mission:

• Build the omnichannel inbox that every business in the world wishes they had — fast, reliable, intuitive, and deeply integrated with everything else our customers do.
• You're not here to manage tickets. You're here to own the product surface that defines HighLevel — and lead the engineers who'll build it into the category winner.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering, with at least 2–3 years managing teams of 8+ engineers.
• Hands-on technical depth — you can still review architecture, debug a production incident, and call out a bad design choice in a PR.
• Excellent product judgment — proven track record of shipping products customers love, not just features that hit deadlines.
• Experience leading teams that own a major product surface with high traffic, real-time requirements, and complex state.
• Strong grasp of distributed systems and/or frontend systems at scale — ideally both.
• Demonstrated ability to run ops cleanly — daily, sprintly, and quarterly — while keeping eyes on the long-term vision.

Requirements

• A team of 10+ engineers — juniors to seniors — building the Conversations product end to end: inbox UI, real-time threads, multi-channel routing, search, automations, and the platform underneath it all.
• A product surface used by millions of users daily, processing 68M+ messages/month and climbing to billions.
• Frontend, backend, and platform work across:
  • Frontend: Vue.js (2/3), Vuex/Pinia, Module Federation, real-time UI at scale
  • Backend: Node.js (TypeScript), Go, event-driven pipelines, 50+ workloads, thousands of pods
  • Infra: GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks), Firestore, MongoDB, Redis, ElasticSearch, ClickHouse

Benefits

• Bring strong product judgment to every roadmap call — what to build, what to kill, what to polish.
• Partner with Product and Design as a true peer — push back, prototype, and ship things that customers actually feel.
• Obsess over the details: latency, layout stability, the way a thread loads on a flaky network, the way a notification lands at the right moment.
• Own the vision — quarterly bets, where the product needs to be in 12 months, what wedge we drive next.
• Be hands-on. Read PRs that matter. Get into the code when the stakes are high. Stay technical enough that your team trusts your calls.
• Own engineering velocity, quality, and stability — three numbers you live and die by.
• Architect for the next 10x: delivery guarantees, retry semantics, idempotency, real-time sync, omnichannel state.
• Run clean ops — daily standups that don't waste time, sprints that ship, quarters that compound.
• Build a high-performing team by putting the right people in the right seats.
• Regular 1:1s. Honest feedback. Real growth conversations.
• No surprises at performance review time.
• Hire smart. Coach harder. Move people up — or move them out — without flinching.
• Set a culture where engineers do their best work of their careers because of you, not in spite of you.

Company Description

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.

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.

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.