Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform

Ticketmaster

Principal Engineer developing resilient backend systems for Ticketmaster's Prepurchase Platform. Collaborating across teams for platform modernization and high-demand workload solutions.

Posted 6/19/2026full-timeRemote • Arizona, Florida, Texas, Virginia • 🇺🇸 United StatesLeadWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

ApacheAWSCloudDistributed SystemsDockerElasticSearchGrafanaGraphQLGRPCJavaKafkaKotlinKubernetesPrometheusRedisSplunkSpringTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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.

Requirements

What you’ll need

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 - 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.
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 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 security best practices - OAuth/OIDC, input validation, secrets management.
Track record of leading technical initiatives across multiple teams without direct authority.

Benefits

Comp & perks

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

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

JavaKotlingRPCKafkaApache FlinkVert.xSpring WebFluxDockerKubernetesTerraform

Soft Skills

leadershipcollaborationproblem-solvingcommunicationdecision-makinginitiativeadaptabilitytechnical initiative