HighLevel - Engineering Manager

• 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. • 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. • 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. • 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. • #LI-Remote #LI-HB1