Principal Engineer (Prepurchase Platform)

Join Ticketmaster as a Principal Engineer in the Prepurchase Platform group, where you'll lead platform modernization efforts, design event-driven architectures, and deliver resilient systems during high-demand on-sales. This hands-on technical role involves writing production code, influencing technical direction, and collaborating with teams across Ticketmaster. You'll have a significant impact on the company's success and enjoy a range of benefits, including medical, dental, and vision coverage, paid time off, a 401(k) program with company match, and more.

• Écrire du code, construire des systèmes et résoudre des problèmes complexes de manière pratique.
• Diriger les efforts de modernisation de la plateforme, concevoir des architectures basées sur des événements et livrer des systèmes résilients.
• Collaborer avec l'équipe d'architecture d'entreprise sur les décisions architecturales et faire évoluer les normes d'ingénierie.
• Strong understanding of security best practices - OAuth/OIDC, input validation, secrets management
• 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
• Proficiency with AI/ML tools and techniques - using LLMs, AI-assisted development, and automation to accelerate engineering workflows and improve system intelligence
• Hands-on experience with a reactive, non-blocking framework (Vert.x, Spring WebFlux, or equivalent) and asynchronous, event-driven service design
• Proven track record building high-throughput, low-latency systems where tail latency, backpressure, and memory pressure are first-class design concerns
• Familiarity with observability tooling: Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, OpenTracing, or equivalent
• Hands-on experience with AWS (EKS) and cloud-native operations - containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), packaging and deploy tooling (Helm, Kustomize), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform)
• Proven experience writing production code and building high-traffic systems at scale - this is a coding role first
• 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
• 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
• 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
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI), and progressive deployment strategies (blue-green, canary)
• Strong command of gRPC (including streaming RPC) and binary serialization formats such as FlatBuffers, Avro, or Protobuf, with schema evolution via a registry
• 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
• 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
• Proficiency with caching strategies (Redis, CDN layer caching) and their application to high-traffic systems
• Track record of leading technical initiatives across multiple teams without direct authority
• 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
• Technical Vision: Anticipates platform challenges and designs systems that scale ahead of demand
• Composure Under Pressure: Stays calm during high-severity incidents and high-demand on-sales, delivering clear resolutions
• Influence Without Authority: Drives architectural decisions and engineering standards through collaboration, not hierarchy
• 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
• 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
• Ownership: Takes end-to-end responsibility for system health, performance, and reliability across the Prepurchase domain
• Continuous Improvement: Identifies opportunities to modernize, simplify, and strengthen systems - and follows through
• Communication: Explains complex technical trade-offs clearly to both engineering peers and non-technical stakeholders