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About the Role

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 focused on distributed systems tradeoffs, understanding existing designs, and acting on problems proactively. You will lead platform modernization, design event-driven architectures, and deliver resilient systems for high-demand on-sales, collaborating across multiple teams within the Prepurchase domain. This is a hands-on technical role with no direct reports, where you will write production code daily, influence technical direction, and partner with teams across Ticketmaster on architectural decisions.

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 - 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).
Experience with compact, search-oriented data structures (e.g. RoaringBitmap, succinct/bitset representations) for representing large in-memory state efficiently.
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.
Systems Thinking: Understands distributed systems as a set of tradeoffs, not a set of correct answers.
Technical Vision: Anticipates platform challenges and designs systems that scale ahead of demand.
Domain Depth: Before changing a system, invests in understanding it fully.
Ownership: Takes end-to-end responsibility for system health, performance, and reliability.
Influence Without Authority: Drives architectural decisions and engineering standards through collaboration, not hierarchy.
Communication: Explains complex technical trade-offs clearly.
Composure Under Pressure: Stays calm during high-severity incidents and high-demand on-sales.
Continuous Improvement: Identifies opportunities to modernize, simplify, and strengthen systems.

Skills

Java
JVM
Kotlin
Vert.x
Spring WebFlux
Kafka Streams
Apache Flink
RocksDB
gRPC
FlatBuffers
Avro
Protobuf
Data-Oriented Design
RoaringBitmap
Elasticsearch
Solr
Microservice design
Istio
Envoy
GraphQL
WebSocket
AWS EKS
Docker
Kubernetes
Helm
Kustomize
Terraform
Redis
GitLab CI
AI/ML tools
LLMs
Grafana
Splunk
Prometheus
OpenTracing
OAuth/OIDC

Location

London, UK

Work Type

Full-time permanent
40h/per week

Experience Level

Principal Engineer

About the Company

Ticketmaster is part of Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s largest live entertainment company.
Ticketmaster's vision is to connect people around the world to the live events they love.
Ticketmaster is the world’s largest ticket marketplace and a leading global provider of enterprise tools and services for the live entertainment business.
The company culture is driven by a passion for Live, with accessible leaders, attentive managers, and enthusiastic teams.
Company values include Reliability, Teamwork, Integrity, and Belonging.

Equal Opportunity

Working in an inclusive environment and encouraged to bring your whole self to work.
Support to successfully balance work and homelife.
Encouragement to develop professional and personal aspirations, enjoy new experiences, and learn from talented people.
Talent is what matters; applications are encouraged from people irrespective of their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability status or caring responsibilities.