Engineering Manager - Phone Core

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Phone Core teams - the mission-critical foundation of HighLevel's communication stack. This group owns the CPaaS platform layer, Phone Billing, Trust and Compliance, and phone number provisioning, serving as the substrate every other channel team builds upon to power a platform processing over 15 billion API hits and 2.5 billion message events daily.

Two of these areas carry outsized leverage. Phone Billing meters and monetises usage for the entire Phone and WhatsApp business - every call, message and number rides through it, so correctness, idempotency and reconciliation are not optional; a rating bug is a revenue and trust incident at the same time. Trust & Compliance is the gate that determines whether customers can send at all: 10DLC and toll-free registration, brand and campaign vetting, carrier filtering, DLT and regional regimes. Regulators and carriers change the rules continuously, so the real engineering problem is designing flexible, rules-driven systems that absorb policy change without a rewrite each time.

The platform handles 100M+ events daily across 15+ services, and LC Phone is a major contributor to HighLevel's revenue where uptime and reliability are paramount. As an Engineering Manager, you'll lead multiple squads (10+ engineers) across these domains, own architecture and delivery for the CPaaS platform layer, and partner with PMs and Staff Engineers to keep a revenue-critical system correct, compliant, and exceptionally fast at a scale few companies ever reach.

Responsibilities:

• Architect for massive scale: Own the high-level architecture and scaling decisions for core Phone platform components, including CPaaS abstractions, provider adapters, and shared messaging/voice APIs that support billions of monthly events.
• Own Phone Billing end-to-end: usage metering, rating, reserve/commit lifecycle, idempotency, reconciliation, and audit trails for the Phone and WhatsApp channels - with zero tolerance for double-charging or lost usage.
• Lead the evolution of Trust and Compliance systems into a configuration-driven, rules-based platform that adapts to new regulatory and carrier requirements without invasive engineering change.
• Work hands-on with technologies like NestJS, Firestore, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Queuing Systems, Data Warehousing Systems and Service Mesh-based microservices.
• Drive high-concurrency innovation: Lead the design and execution of cross-cutting initiatives to improve reliability, latency, and throughput across time-sensitive APIs and workflows serving millions of businesses.
• Drive observability and resilience by evolving our monitoring, alerting (Prometheus/Grafana), and incident response strategies - including the financial invariants that must be alerted on, not just the technical ones.
• Leverage LLMs and AI tools to write, refactor, test, and debug code efficiently - while implementing guardrails to reduce hallucination and boost reliability.
• Partner with product, infra, security, finance and legal teams to ensure data integrity, access control, and compliance across phone services.
• Develop EM I leaders and senior engineers, build leadership pipeline, succession planning and raise the hiring bar.
• Participate in design reviews, deep dives, and on-call rotations to support a high-bar culture of accountability and operational excellence.
• Develop leaders and senior engineers, build leadership pipeline, succession planning and raise the hiring bar.
• Own multiple teams/products, establish the engineering system, set technical direction, develop leaders.

Requirements:

• 9+ years of backend engineering experience with 2+ years of leadership, with a proven track record of designing fault-tolerant systems that operate at a scale of billions of hits or events.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and asynchronous job processing.
• Demonstrated experience building systems where correctness is non-negotiable - metering, ledgers, billing, payments, or comparable transactional domains - with a working grasp of idempotency, exactly-once semantics, and reconciliation.
• Proven experience optimising availability, performance, and reliability in real-world systems under load.
• Strong experience with relational and NoSQL data models (especially with complex transactional data).
• Experience designing policy- or rules-driven systems that evolve with external requirements rather than hard-coding them.
• Familiarity with monitoring, SLOs, and root-cause analysis in production environments.
• Familiarity with hallucination mitigation strategies (e. g., code constraints, test scaffolding, embeddings, context injection).
• Excellent communication and cross-functional collaboration skills, including with Finance, Legal and external partners.
• A pragmatic, hands-on leader who balances long-term vision with iterative execution.

Preferred Experience:

• Experience with usage-based billing or metering engines in a high-volume product, specifically managing millions of transactional events per hour.
• Exposure to telecom trust and compliance regimes - 10DLC, toll-free verification, TCPA/TSR, DLT, carrier filtering or number portability.
• Experience building provider-agnostic integration layers across multiple third-party vendors.
• Experience working with AI Tools, Communication APIs (Twilio, Plivo, etc).
• Contributions to open-source tools, internal platforms, or engineering blogs.