Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform

About the role

The Prepurchase Platform group owns the backend services that power every fan's path to a ticket. We handle event discovery, real-time seat availability, and interactive venue experiences at massive scale, processing billions of API calls during peak on-sales. Our engineers build systems that must be fast, resilient, and available when it matters most.

Responsibilities

• Identify and act on production problems without being prompted.
• Build end-to-end, high-availability systems that handle extreme traffic spikes during high-demand on-sales without degradation.
• Lead platform modernization initiatives - migrating legacy services to cloud-native, microservice-based architectures.
• Design and implement streaming and event-driven solutions using Kafka/gRPC, enabling real-time data flow across services.
• Embed deeply in a specific service area when needed, or work horizontally across teams to solve cross-cutting problems.
• Champion resilience patterns: circuit breakers, graceful degradation, bulkheads, and auto-scaling strategies.
• Collaborate with the Enterprise Architecture team on architectural decisions and evolve engineering standards across the Prepurchase domain.
• Partner with product, security, and SRE teams to align technical decisions with business priorities.
• Drive observability improvements - ensuring services are instrumented for monitoring, alerting, and rapid incident response.
• Identify and eliminate single points of failure, improving system reliability and reducing on-call burden.
• Apply AI and machine learning tools to improve developer productivity, automate operational tasks, and enhance system capabilities.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies that improve performance, reliability, or engineering velocity.

Requirements

• Proven ability to reason about distributed systems tradeoffs - scalability, consistency, availability, latency and make defensible design decisions under real constraints.
• Proven experience writing production code and building high-traffic systems at scale - this is a coding role first.
• Expertise in Java (17+); and the JVM, with strong command of JVM internals, garbage collection behavior, and performance tuning under load.
• Kotlin is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with a reactive, non-blocking framework (Vert.x, Spring WebFlux, or equivalent) and asynchronous, event-driven service design.
• Deep experience with stream processing and event-driven architecture - Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, or equivalent - including stateful streaming, topology design, and managing local state stores (e.g. RocksDB) at scale.
• Proven track record building high-throughput, low-latency systems where tail latency, backpressure, and memory pressure are first-class design concerns.
• Strong command of gRPC (including streaming RPC) and binary serialization formats such as FlatBuffers, Avro, or Protobuf, with schema evolution via a registry.
• Familiarity with Data-Oriented Design (DoD) - structuring code around how data is laid out, accessed, and transformed for cache efficiency and throughput, rather than around object hierarchies.
• Experience with compact, search-oriented data structures (e.g. RoaringBitmap, succinct/bitset representations) for representing large in-memory state efficiently. Experience with search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr) for discovery workloads is a plus.
• Strong grasp of microservice design, service mesh (Istio/Envoy), API contract evolution, and backend-for-frontend patterns, including GraphQL APIs and WebSocket subscriptions for real-time client delivery.
• Hands-on experience with AWS (EKS) and cloud-native operations - containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), packaging and deploy tooling (Helm, Kustomize), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Proficiency with caching strategies (Redis, CDN layer caching) and their application to high-traffic systems.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI), and progressive deployment strategies (blue-green, canary).
• Experience designing for high availability - mult-region active-active/active-passive architectures, failover strategies, disaster recovery and systems that remain stable under adversarial load and abuse.
• Proficiency with AI/ML tools and techniques - using LLMs, AI-assisted development, and automation to accelerate engineering workflows and improve system intelligence.
• Strong understanding of security best practices - OAuth/OIDC, input validation, secrets management.
• Track record of leading technical initiatives across multiple teams without direct authority.

Qualifications

• Systems Thinking: Understands distributed systems as a set of tradeoffs, not a set of correct answers. Understands that failures emerge from system interactions and missing feedback loops - not just broken components. Evaluates designs by asking why they exist and what constraints shaped them, not just whether they match a preferred pattern.
• Technical Vision: Anticipates platform challenges and designs systems that scale ahead of demand.
• Domain Depth: Before changing a system, invests in understanding it fully - its history, the teams and services it interacts with, the constraints that shaped its current design, and the forces.
• Ownership: Takes end-to-end responsibility for system health, performance, and reliability across the Prepurchase domain.
• Influence Without Authority: Drives architectural decisions and engineering standards through collaboration, not hierarchy.
• Communication: Explains complex technical trade-offs clearly to both engineering peers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Composure Under Pressure: Stays calm during high-severity incidents and high-demand on-sales, delivering clear resolutions.
• Continuous Improvement: Identifies opportunities to modernize, simplify, and strengthen systems - and follows through.

Skills

• Java (17+); and the JVM, with strong command of JVM internals, garbage collection behavior, and performance tuning under load.
• Kotlin is a plus.
• Reactive, non-blocking framework (Vert.x, Spring WebFlux, or equivalent) and asynchronous, event-driven service design.
• Stream processing and event-driven architecture - Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, or equivalent - including stateful streaming, topology design, and managing local state stores (e.g. RocksDB) at scale.
• High-throughput, low-latency systems where tail latency, backpressure, and memory pressure are first-class design concerns.
• gRPC (including streaming RPC) and binary serialization formats such as FlatBuffers, Avro, or Protobuf, with schema evolution via a registry.
• Data-Oriented Design (DoD) - structuring code around how data is laid out, accessed, and transformed for cache efficiency and throughput, rather than around object hierarchies.
• Compact, search-oriented data structures (e.g. RoaringBitmap, succinct/bitset representations) for representing large in-memory state efficiently. Experience with search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr) for discovery workloads is a plus.
• Microservice design, service mesh (Istio/Envoy), API contract evolution, and backend-for-frontend patterns, including GraphQL APIs and WebSocket subscriptions for real-time client delivery.
• AWS (EKS) and cloud-native operations - containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), packaging and deploy tooling (Helm, Kustomize), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).
• Caching strategies (Redis, CDN layer caching) and their application to high-traffic systems.
• CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI), and progressive deployment strategies (blue-green, canary).
• High availability - mult-region active-active/active-passive architectures, failover strategies, disaster recovery and systems that remain stable under adversarial load and abuse.
• AI/ML tools and techniques - using LLMs, AI-assisted development, and automation to accelerate engineering workflows and improve system intelligence.
• Observability tooling: Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, OpenTracing, or equivalent.
• Security best practices - OAuth/OIDC, input validation, secrets management.
• Leading technical initiatives across multiple teams without direct authority.

Benefits

Through our 'Taking Care of Our Own' program, we provide benefits across six key pillars:

• HEALTH: Medical, vision, dental and mental health benefits for you and your family, with access to a health care concierge, and Flexible or Health Savings Accounts (FSA or HSA)
• YOURSELF: Free concert tickets, generous paid time off including paid holidays, sick time, and personal days
• WEALTH: 401(k) program with company match, stock reimbursement program
• FAMILY: New parent programs including caregiver leave, plus fertility, adoption, foster, or surrogacy support
• CAREER: Career and skill development programs with School of Live, tuition reimbursement, and student loan repayment
• OTHERS: Volunteer time off, crowdfunding match

Schedule

Full-time permanent, 40h/per week

Pay

Commensurate with experience