Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform

Responsibilities

• 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.

Benefits

Additional Information

Job Summary: JOB DESCRIPTION - Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform Location: Florida, Virginia, Arizona, Texas, 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.

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