Principal Engineer (Prepurchase Platform)

Role overview

Join Ticketmaster as a Principal Engineer in the Prepurchase Platform group. This is a hands-on, coding-first role where you lead platform modernization, design event-driven architectures, and deliver resilient systems during high-demand on-sales.

Key missions

• Write production code and build practical solutions to complex engineering problems.
• Lead platform modernization efforts.
• Design event-based architectures and deliver resilient, high-throughput services.
• Collaborate with enterprise architecture on architectural decisions and evolve engineering standards.

Responsibilities (what you’ll do)

• Influence technical direction while partnering across teams at Ticketmaster.
• Ensure systems are stable under high load, including tail latency, backpressure, and memory pressure considerations.
• Design for high availability (including multi-region active-active/active-passive patterns, failover, and disaster recovery).
• Drive distributed-systems design tradeoffs (scalability, consistency, availability, latency).
• Lead technical initiatives across multiple teams without direct authority.

Requirements

• Strong security fundamentals, including:
  • OAuth/OIDC
  • Input validation
  • Secrets management
• Experience with reactive, non-blocking frameworks (e.g., Vert.x or Spring WebFlux) and asynchronous, event-driven service design.
• Proven ability to build high-throughput, low-latency systems.
• Strong observability skills (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, OpenTracing or equivalents).
• Hands-on cloud-native experience with AWS (EKS).
• Containerization and deployment tooling:
  • Docker, Kubernetes
  • Helm, Kustomize
  • Infrastructure as Code with Terraform
• Strong production coding experience with scale and high-traffic systems.
• Deep expertise in Java (17+) and the JVM (internals, GC behavior, and performance tuning). Kotlin is a plus.
• Microservice design experience, including:
  • Service mesh (Istio/Envoy)
  • API contract evolution
  • Backend-for-Frontend patterns
  • GraphQL and WebSocket subscriptions for real-time delivery
• CI/CD and progressive delivery:
  • CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitLab CI)
  • blue-green and canary deployments
• Strong understanding of gRPC (including streaming) and binary serialization formats with schema evolution:
  • FlatBuffers, Avro, Protobuf (with a registry)
• Deep experience with stream processing and event-driven architecture (e.g., Kafka Streams, Apache Flink), including stateful streaming and local state stores (e.g., RocksDB).
• Caching experience and strategies (e.g., Redis, CDN caching).
• Ability to design and reason about distributed systems tradeoffs.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with Data-Oriented Design (DoD) and cache-efficient data layouts.
• Experience with compact, search-oriented in-memory data structures (e.g., RoaringBitmap, succinct/bitset representations) and search/discovery workloads (Elasticsearch, Solr).
• Experience with AI/ML tools and techniques (LLMs, AI-assisted development, automation).
• Experience designing for high availability under adversarial load and abuse.

Location / work setup

• Full remote (role located for London, GB).