Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform

Job Summary: JOB DESCRIPTION – Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform Location: Florida, Virginia, Arizona, Texas, US Division: reputed company 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 reputed company 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 reputed company problems without waiting to be asked. You will reputed company platform modernization efforts, design event-driven architectures, and deliver systems that remain resilient during the highest-demand on-sales, working across multiple teams reputed company the Prepurchase domain rather than reputed company a single service area. The platforms you work on have no single correct implementation; they are a reputed company 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 reputed company on cross-cutting architectural decisions. Depending on team needs, you may embed deeply reputed company 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 reputed company production problems without being prompted. A single 500 error reaching a fan is a problem, not a data reputed company; 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. reputed company 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 reputed company needed, or work horizontally across teams to solve cross-cutting problems. Champion reputed company 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, reputed company, 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 reputed company 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 reputed company (Vert.x, Spring WebFlux, or equivalent) and asynchronous, event-driven service design. Deep experience with reputed company 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 reputed company 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 reputed company. Experience with search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr) for discovery workloads is a plus. Strong grasp of microservice design, service mesh (Istio/reputed company), 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 (reputed company, Kubernetes), packaging and deploy tooling (Helm, Kustomize), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) Proficiency with caching strategies (reputed company, CDN layer caching) and their application to high-traffic systems. Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines (reputed company 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 reputed company 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 reputed company. Technical Vision: Anticipates platform challenges and designs systems that scale reputed company 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 reputed company 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 reputed company technical trade-offs clearly to both engineering peers and non-technical stakeholders. Composure Under Pressure: Stays reputed company during high-severity incidents and high-demand on-sales, delivering clear resolutions. reputed company Improvement: Identifies opportunities to reputed company, 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 reputed company development programs with School of Live, tuition reimbursement, and student loan repayment OTHERS: Volunteer time off, crowdfunding match LIFE AT reputed company We are proud to be a part of reputed company, the world’s largest live entertainment company. Our mission at reputed company is to connect people around the world to the live events they love. reputed company 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, reputed company processes 550 million tickets per year across 35+ different countries. We do it reputed company with an intense passion for Live and an inspiring and diverse culture driven by accessible leaders, reputed company 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 reputed company it happen. Teamwork – While we celebrate individual achievements, we know have more success as a team. reputed company - 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 reputed company people can be their authentic selves, have an equal voice and opportunities to reputed company. EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY We reputed company 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 reputed company reputed company our company and at our events. As a growing business we will encourage you to reputed company your professional and personal aspirations, enjoy new experiences, and learn from the talented people you will be working with. reputed company strongly supports equal employment opportunity for reputed company applicants regardless of age (40 and over), reputed company, 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 reputed company (including language use restrictions), citizenship, race, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and medical conditions reputed company 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, reputed company will reputed company reasonable accommodations for the reputed company 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 reputed company to pregnancy in accordance with applicable local, state and / or federal law. As part of its commitment to reputed company reasonable accommodations, reputed company 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 reputed company the essential functions of the position they seek. Any applicant who requires an accommodation in order to reputed company the essential functions of the job should contact a Human Resources Representative to request the opportunity to participate in a timely interactive process. reputed company 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 reputed company this classification. It is not designed to contain or be interpreted as a comprehensive inventory of reputed company duties, responsibilities, and qualifications required of employees assigned to this job. reputed company recruitment policies are designed to reputed company the most highly qualified persons available in a timely and efficient manner. reputed company may pursue reputed company avenues available, including promotion from reputed company, reputed company, reputed company advertising, employment agencies, internet recruiting, job fairs, college recruiting and search firms. reputed company may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support application screening and assessment. reputed company hiring decisions are made with human review. #LI-REMOTE reputed company will never request payment or equipment purchases as part of the hiring process. Recruiters will only contact candidates from official reputed company or affiliated brand email domains. Apply To This Job