Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform

Job Summary:

JOB DESCRIPTION – Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform

Location: Florida, US

Division: Ticketmaster NA

Line Manager: VP Engineering, Accounts, Identity and Pre-Purchase

Contract Terms: Full-time permanent, 40h/per week

THE TEAM

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

LIFE AT TICKETMASTER

We are proud to be a part of Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s largest live entertainment company.

Our mission at Ticketmaster is to connect people around the world to the live events they love. Ticketmaster is the world’s largest ticket marketplace and the global market leader in live event ticketing products and services. Through official partnerships with thousands of venues, artists, sports teams, festivals, performing arts centers and theaters, Ticketmaster processes 550 million tickets per year across 35+ different countries.

We do it all with an intense passion for Live and an inspiring and diverse culture driven by accessible leaders, attentive managers, and enthusiastic teams. If you’re passionate about live entertainment like we are, and you want to work at a company dedicated to helping millions of fans experience it, we want to hear from you.

Our work is guided by our values:

Reliability - Fans and clients count on us to power their live event experiences and we rely on each other to make it happen.

Teamwork – While we celebrate individual achievements, we know have more success as a team.

Integrity - We are committed to the highest moral and ethical standards on behalf of the countless partners and stakeholders we represent.

Belonging - We are committed to building a culture in which all people can be their authentic selves, have an equal voice and opportunities to thrive.

EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY

We aspire to build teams that reflect and support the fans and artists we serve. Every day we aim to promote environments where everyone can be themselves, contribute fully, and thrive within our company and at our events. As a growing business we will encourage you to develop your professional and personal aspirations, enjoy new experiences, and learn from the talented people you will be working with. 

Ticketmaster strongly supports equal employment opportunity for all applicants regardless of age (40 and over), ancestry, color, religious creed (including religious dress and grooming practices), family and medical care leave or the denial of family and medical care leave, mental or physical disability (including HIV and AIDS), marital status, domestic partner status, medical condition (including cancer and genetic characteristics), genetic information, military and veteran status, political affiliation, national origin (including language use restrictions), citizenship, race, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and medical conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding), gender, gender identity, and gender expression, sexual orientation, intersectionality, or any other basis protected by applicable federal, state or local law, rule, ordinance or regulation. 

We will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of the Los Angeles Fair Chance Ordinance, San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance and the California Fair Chance Act and consistent with other similar and / or applicable laws in other areas.

We also afford equal employment opportunities to qualified individuals with a disability. For this reason, Ticketmaster will make reasonable accommodations for the known physical or mental limitations of an otherwise qualified individual with a disability who is an applicant consistent with its legal obligations to do so, including reasonable accommodations related to pregnancy in accordance with applicable local, state and / or federal law. As part of its commitment to make reasonable accommodations, Ticketmaster also wishes to participate in a timely, good faith, interactive process with a disabled applicant to determine effective reasonable accommodations, if any, which can be made in response to a request for accommodations. Applicants are invited to identify reasonable accommodations that can be made to assist them to perform the essential functions of the position they seek. Any applicant who requires an accommodation in order to perform the essential functions of the job should contact a Human Resources Representative to request the opportunity to participate in a timely interactive process.  Ticketmaster will also provide reasonable religious accommodations on a case-by-case basis.

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.