Job Summary:
JOB DESCRIPTION - Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform
Location: Florida, Virginia, Arizona, Texas, US
Division: Ticketmaster NA
Line Manager: VP Engineering, Accounts, Identity and Pre-Purchase
Contract Terms: Full-time permanent, 40h/per week
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.
THE JOB
As a Principal Engineer on the Prepurchase Platform team, you will write code, build systems, and solve hard problems hands-on. This is a systems thinking role: you will reason carefully about distributed systems tradeoffs, understand why existing designs exist before proposing changes, and act on problems without waiting to be asked.
You will lead platform modernization efforts, design event-driven architectures, and deliver systems that remain resilient during the highest-demand on-sales, working across multiple teams within the Prepurchase domain rather than within a single service area. The platforms you work on have no single correct implementation; they are a continuous series of tradeoff decisions made under real constraints. Your value comes from understanding those tradeoffs clearly and improving them deliberately, not from implementing solutions in a vacuum.
This is a hands-on technical role with no direct reports. You will write production code daily, influence technical direction, and partner with teams across Ticketmaster on cross-cutting architectural decisions. Depending on team needs, you may embed deeply within a single service area or work horizontally across multiple teams, the role flexes to where the highest-impact work is.
WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING
- Identify and act on production problems without being prompted. A single 500 error reaching a fan is a problem, not a data point; treat it accordingly and act with urgency regardless of volume.
- 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.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW (or TECHNICAL SKILLS)
- Proven ability to reason about distributed systems tradeoffs - scalability, consistency, availability, latency and make defensible design decisions under real constraints. This is the core bar for this role.
- 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.
- Familiarity with observability tooling: Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, OpenTracing, or equivalent.
- Strong understanding of security best practices - OAuth/OIDC, input validation, secrets management.
- Track record of leading technical initiatives across multiple teams without direct authority.
YOU (BEHAVIOURAL SKILLS)
- 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.
BENEFITS & PERKS
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
HIRING PRACTICES
The preceding job description has been designed to indicate the general nature and level of work performed by employees within this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of all duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job.
Ticketmaster recruitment policies are designed to place the most highly qualified persons available in a timely and efficient manner. Ticketmaster may pursue all avenues available, including promotion from within, employee referrals, outside advertising, employment agencies, internet recruiting, job fairs, college recruiting and search firms. Ticketmaster may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support application screening and assessment. All hiring decisions are made with human review. #LI-REMOTE
Live Nation Entertainment will never request payment or equipment purchases as part of the hiring process. Recruiters will only contact candidates from official Live Nation or affiliated brand email domains.
