Staff Frontend Engineer - Commerce

About this role

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:

You are the technical owner of every pixel a Commerce merchant or shopper sees. You also raise the frontend bar for all of HighLevel. The role has two horizons.

Commerce first. You set the architecture. You write the standards. You review the code. You hire the team. You hold the line on performance, accessibility, and quality while engineers and their coding agents ship into Commerce every day.

Then HighLevel. Commerce is greenfield. That makes it the place to prove what excellent frontend engineering looks like at HighLevel. What works in Commerce becomes a shared capability, so every organization benefits.

The central frontend platform team is your closest partner on both horizons. They own the shared foundation. You are their most demanding customer and one of their strongest contributors. You bring Commerce requirements early. You co-design solutions with them. You upstream what Commerce builds, so HighLevel keeps one foundation.

This is an individual contributor role at staff level. You lead through design documents, code, reviews, and the people you grow. You will write production code every week.

The bar is high. A storefront that loads in six seconds loses the sale. A checkout a screen reader cannot use excludes a customer and breaks the law in some markets. An architecture that couples every team slows every one of them. A pattern that stays inside one organization helps only that organization. You own all four problems.

Responsibilities:

First 90 days

• Publish the Commerce frontend standard: architecture, state, data fetching, testing, accessibility, and performance. Every Commerce team adopts it.

• Instrument real-user monitoring on every Commerce surface. Publish field metrics for LCP, INP, and CLS per surface, with an owning team for each.

• Review frontend pull requests across Commerce. Raise the quality of every one you touch, and write down the patterns so reviews scale beyond you.

• Map the central frontend platform roadmap against Commerce needs. Agree a working contract with that team: what the platform provides, what Commerce builds, and how requests and contributions flow both ways.

• Set up a standing design review with the central platform team, so Commerce decisions and platform decisions stay aligned.

• Produce a frontend hiring plan: how many engineers, at what levels, and in what order.

First 6 months

• Ship the architecture that lets every Commerce team build and deploy its surfaces independently, with enforced module boundaries. Build it on the central platform's foundation wherever one exists, and close gaps jointly with that team.

• Put performance and bundle budgets in CI for every Commerce route. A regression fails the build.

• Make accessibility a gate: automated checks in CI and manual audits on checkout and storefront flows against WCAG 2.2 AA.

• Land typed, generated API clients end to end, so a backend contract change breaks at compile time.

• Contribute at least one Commerce-built capability to the central platform, adopted by another organization.

• Hire and onboard the first Commerce frontend engineers.

First 12 months

• Commerce storefronts meet "good" Core Web Vitals at the 75th percentile in field data, on mid-range mobile devices.

• Checkout and storefront pass a WCAG 2.2 AA audit.

• Backend engineers ship frontend features that meet the standard without your direct involvement.

• Coding agents across Commerce follow the frontend standard by default, through shared instructions, skills, and review gates you designed.

• Commerce is HighLevel's reference implementation for frontend excellence. Its standards, performance budgets, and agent guidance reach other organizations through the central platform.

• You lead or co-lead HighLevel-wide frontend decisions with the central platform team, written as RFCs other organizations build on.

• The Commerce frontend team runs on its own. You spend your time on the next hardest problem at HighLevel.

Requirements:

• You have 9+ years of experience in building frontend systems

• You have built commerce surfaces at scale: storefronts, checkout, or point of sale.

• You have built or led a design system consumed by many teams, and shipped breaking changes through it safely.

• You have used ConnectRPC, gRPC-Web, or protocol buffers from…