# Sr. Staff Engineer - Payments & Commerce Platform

**Company:** [GoHighLevel](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/gohighlevel)
**Location:** Remote
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Go, Connectrpc, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, GCP, GKE, Kubernetes, Pub/Sub, Redis, MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, Vue, React Query
**Posted:** 2026-09-05

> Leads architecture and reliability for a global payments and commerce platform, shaping APIs, distributed systems, observability, compliance, and production operations. Requires 10+ years of backend experience, deep Go and distributed-systems expertise, and Staff/Principal-level technical leadership.

## Job Description

## Responsibilities
- Architect and ship multi-tenant, planet-scale commerce services for checkout, subscriptions, payments orchestration, invoicing, and tax.
- Own API and schema design, including protobuf/ConnectRPC conventions, versioning, deprecation, compatibility, and contract testing.
- Design resilient payment paths using retries, circuit breakers, idempotency, outbox/Saga patterns, graceful degradation, and automated replay.
- Ensure auditability through append-only double-entry ledgers, immutable event streams, trace-linked entities, tamper-evident trails, and reconciliation.
- Establish service catalogs, ownership scorecards, SLOs, runbooks, autoscaling, quotas, and configuration standards.
- Lead observability, production excellence, canary and blue-green deployments, rollback automation, chaos drills, disaster recovery, and incident response.
- Embed security and compliance practices covering PCI scope reduction, tokenization, secrets, KMS, retention, archival, and privacy controls.
- Create developer golden paths, service templates, ADR/RFC processes, contract tests, ephemeral environments, and performance harnesses.
- Lead domain evolution, reliability strategy, data governance, technical reviews, postmortems, hiring, mentoring, and cross-functional planning.

## Requirements
- 10+ years building and operating backend systems, including 5+ years with Go and 2–3+ years at Staff/Principal or Tech Lead level.
- Deep experience with protobuf, ConnectRPC/gRPC, API lifecycle management, versioning, compatibility, contract testing, and Buf.
- Strong distributed systems knowledge, including idempotency, deduplication, outbox patterns, ordering, concurrency control, backpressure, and consensus fundamentals.
- Experience with event-driven architectures on GCP, Pub/Sub, Redis, MongoDB, Firestore, and ClickHouse.
- Experience operating Kubernetes/GKE at scale, including HPA/VPA, PDBs, resource management, multi-region topologies, CI/CD, and progressive delivery.
- Reliability engineering experience with SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, capacity and load testing, incident management, and disaster recovery/business continuity.
- Knowledge of secrets and KMS practices, PCI fundamentals, data governance, retention, and archival.
- Testing experience across unit, integration, contract, property-based, and performance testing.
- Understanding of Vue.js and TanStack Query for effective frontend/API collaboration.
- Exceptional technical writing and communication skills, including design documents, ADRs/RFCs, postmortems, and stakeholder updates.

## Nice to Have
- Experience integrating payment service providers or local rails such as UPI, wallets, BNPL, cards, and 3DS2.
- Experience with active-active or multi-region architectures, chaos engineering, and traffic management.
- Organization-scale OpenTelemetry leadership, including tail-based sampling and exemplars.
- FinOps experience with cost baselining, quotas, budget alarms, and workload right-sizing.
- Familiarity with PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and privacy laws.

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