Principal Engineer I – Prepurchase Platform
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Job Description
Principal Engineer developing backend services for Ticketmaster's Prepurchase Platform. Writing production code and solving distributed systems challenges at scale.
Responsibilities:
- Identify and act on production problems without being prompted.
- 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.
Requirements:
- Proven ability to reason about distributed systems tradeoffs - scalability, consistency, availability, latency and make defensible design decisions under real constraints.
- Proven experience writing production code and building high-traffic systems at scale.
- Expertise in Java (17+); and the JVM, with strong command of JVM internals, garbage collection behavior, and performance tuning under load.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Proficiency with AI/ML tools and techniques - using LLMs, AI-assisted development, and automation to accelerate engineering workflows.
- Familiarity with observability tooling: Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, OpenTracing, or equivalent.
- Strong understanding of security best practices - OAuth/OIDC, input validation, secrets management.
Benefits:
- 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)
- Free concert tickets, generous paid time off including paid holidays, sick time, and personal days
- 401(k) program with company match, stock reimbursement program
- New parent programs including caregiver leave, plus fertility, adoption, foster, or surrogacy support
- Career and skill development programs with School of Live, tuition reimbursement, and student loan repayment
- Volunteer time off, crowdfunding match
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