Lead Engineer - AI Studio

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

About the Role

We’re looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join our AI Studio Team, the group responsible for building AI Studio — an AI-based React application builder that generates production-ready websites and other React applications from natural language, which users can then connect to custom domains and publish live to the internet — from prompt-driven app generation, component and layout creation, automated copy/design generation, real-time preview and editing, to one-click deployment across our product ecosystem.

This team owns the intelligence layer that helps millions of SMBs build production-ready websites and React applications without technical expertise. The AI Studio platform orchestrates complex workflows across data processing, LLM-powered reasoning, code and component generation, design generation, and live deployment to custom domains. With millions of applications and billions of visitor interactions flowing through our systems, reliability, correctness, and performance are mission-critical.

Responsibilities

• As a Lead Engineer, you will drive the technical direction for our AI-driven application-builder architecture, lead complex system design decisions, and serve as a hands-on technical leader and mentor for the engineers building AI Studio’s app generation engine, React website/app builder, design and component systems, domain publishing pipeline, and AI Agents. This is a hands-on individual contributor role — you’ll spend the majority of your time designing systems and writing production code — while partnering closely with product, infra, and design to shape the roadmap, raise engineering standards, and deliver intuitive, generative, high-performance user experiences at scale.

Architecture & Platform Ownership

• Own architecture and scaling decisions for core AI Studio platform components (e.g., App Generation Engine, React Build & Render Pipeline, Domain & Publishing Pipeline, AI Content Systems)
• Lead design and implementation of cross-cutting initiatives to improve system responsiveness, generation accuracy, and platform robustness
• Build scalable, fault-tolerant LLM pipelines for content generation, layout creation, experimentation, and AI-driven user guidance

AI & Distributed Systems Engineering

• Work hands-on with technologies like Go, NestJS, Node, PostgreSQL, Firestore, Vector Databases, Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare KV, and microservices
• Design distributed systems that handle high-throughput generative and analytical workloads while ensuring correctness and low latency
• Build and optimize embeddings pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and multi-agent orchestration frameworks

Quality, Observability & Reliability

• Drive improvements in observability using Prometheus/Grafana, OpenTelemetry, and structured logging
• Establish and maintain SLOs for generation latency, correctness, model safety, and system uptime
• Strengthen resiliency and failover strategies to ensure seamless user experiences during traffic spikes and model load variations

AI Guardrails, Safety & Tooling

• Implement hallucination mitigation strategies (code constraints, structured outputs, model verification layers, retrieval guards, test scaffolding)
• Collaborate with infra and security to enforce data governance, access control, privacy boundaries, and compliance around user-generated data
• Leverage LLMs and AI tools to write, test, and debug code — while driving standards that ensure reliability and consistency across engineering teams

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and pairing, leading by influence to promote technical excellence, code quality, and a high-ownership culture (this is an individual contributor role with no direct reports)
• Partner with PMs, designers, and other engineering leaders to define long-term roadmap and deliver high-performing AI-powered application-building features
• Participate in reviews, deep dives, and on-call rotations to maintain a culture of accountability and operational excellence

Requirements

Core Experience

• 6+ years of backend engineering experience, including distributed system design and high-scale platform development
• Strong proficiency in Go (Golang) for building high-performance, concurrent backend services, alongside Node/NestJS experience
• Hands-on experience building and operating edge/serverless services with Cloudflare Workers and Cloudflare KV (or comparable edge compute and distributed key-value stores)
• Deep expertise in event-driven architectures, asynchronous workflows, and high-throughput data pipelines.
• Strong command of relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL data models, query optimization, and complex transactional data
• Fluency in LLM integrations, vector search, embeddings, RAG patterns, and generative AI frameworks
• Familiarity with frontend architecture using Vue, and a solid understanding of UI/UX principles

Operational Excellence

• Experience with monitoring, alerting, and incident response for production systems
• Strong instincts for scaling, latency optimization, and reliability under real-world load

AI & LLM Safety

• Experience implementing structured generation, verification layers, retrieval-based grounding, and guardrails to reduce hallucinations
• Understanding of prompt engineering patterns, context injection, and model evaluation

Soft Skills

• Exceptional communication and cross-functional leadership capabilities
• Pragmatic decision-making with a balance of long-term vision and iterative execution