Responsibilities
- Lead the team building the Conversations product, the most-used surface in HighLevel.
- Own the vision for the omnichannel inbox — quarterly bets, 12-month roadmap, next wedge.
- Partner with Product and Design as a true peer — push back, prototype, and ship things customers actually feel.
- Obsess over product details: latency, layout stability, thread loading on flaky networks, notification timing.
- Be hands-on: read PRs, get into code during high-stakes incidents, stay technically credible.
- Own engineering velocity, quality, and stability.
- Architect for scale: delivery guarantees, retry semantics, idempotency, real-time sync, omnichannel state.
- Run clean operations: daily standups, sprints that ship, quarters that compound.
- Build a high-performing team: place right people in right seats, conduct regular 1:1s, give honest feedback.
- Hire smart, coach harder, move people up or out without flinching.
- Set a culture where engineers do their best work because of you, not in spite of you.
Requirements
- 8+ years in software engineering, with at least 2–3 years managing teams of 8+ engineers.
- Hands-on technical depth — able to review architecture, debug production incidents, and identify bad design choices in PRs.
- Excellent product judgment — proven track record of shipping products customers love, not just features on time.
- 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 operations cleanly — daily, sprintly, and quarterly — while maintaining long-term vision.
Nice to Have
- Experience building inboxes, messaging, communication, or collaboration products.
- Familiarity with stack: Vue.js, Node.js, Go, GCP, Kubernetes, Firestore, MongoDB, ClickHouse, ElasticSearch.
- Experience shipping omnichannel or multi-channel systems (SMS, Email, WhatsApp, etc.).
- Experience taking a 0→1 product to scale or rebuilding one mid-flight without breaking it.
Work Arrangement
Remote (Worldwide)
Team
Team size: 10. Structure: Lead a team of 10+ engineers — juniors to seniors — building the Conversations product end to end.
About the Role
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.
What You’ll Lead
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. The roadmap, the architecture, and the people decisions that determine whether we win this category.
What You’ll Drive
On the product side: 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. On the engineering side: 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. On the people side: 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.
What Success Looks Like
The team is shipping fast and clean. Velocity is high, regressions are rare, and on-call is boring. Customers tell us, "I don't need Gmail anymore." Then they tell their friends. Your team is the one other teams want to join. You've earned the trust of engineers, PMs, designers, and leadership — because you deliver.
How You Operate
Customers > Org > Team > Self. That's the order. In that order. Always. No blame games. Something broke? Fix it, learn from it, ship the post-mortem, move on. Customer-first thinking, not ego-first. The right answer wins — even if it wasn't yours. Strong opinions, weakly held. You'll change your mind when the data says so. You don't wait for permission to lead. You see the gap, you close it.
What We're Not
We're not corporate. We're not politics. We don't do fluff. We don't do performance theater. We do performance. We don't track hours. But when production breaks or a launch is on the line, we show up.
Bonus Points
Experience building inboxes, messaging, communication, or collaboration products. Familiarity with our stack: Vue.js, Node.js, Go, GCP, Kubernetes, Firestore, MongoDB, ClickHouse, ElasticSearch. You've shipped omnichannel or multi-channel systems (SMS, Email, WhatsApp, etc.) before. You've taken a 0→1 product to scale — or rebuilt one mid-flight without breaking it.
Additional Information
- Global, remote-first organization.
- No performance theater — focus on real performance.
- No tracking hours, but expected to show up when production breaks or a launch is on the line.
- Culture of no blame games — fix it, learn, ship post-mortem, move on.
- Customer > Org > Team > Self priority order.
- Strong opinions, weakly held — change your mind when data says so.
- Lead without waiting for permission — see the gap, close it.
