Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform (Remote)

livenation; City Of London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Ticketmaster is seeking a Principal Engineer I for the Prepurchase Platform in London. This hands-on role focuses on distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and platform modernization to sustain high-demand on-sales.

You will write production code daily, influence technical direction, and collaborate across multiple teams within the Prepurchase domain. You will drive observability, resilience patterns, and AI-assisted enhancements while embedding across services or working horizontally.

Qualifications

• Reason about distributed systems tradeoffs: scalability, consistency, availability, latency.
• Proven experience writing production code and building high-traffic systems.
• Expertise in Java 17+ and JVM internals; Kotlin is a plus.
• Hands-on experience with reactive frameworks and event-driven design.
• Deep experience with stream processing: Kafka Streams or Flink.
• Proven track record building high-throughput, low-latency systems.
• Strong gRPC experience with streaming and binary formats.
• Familiarity with DoD data layouts and search engines is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Identify and address production problems with urgency and clarity.
• Build end-to-end, high-availability systems for extreme traffic.
• Lead platform modernization to cloud-native microservices.
• Design and implement streaming/event-driven solutions (Kafka/gRPC).
• Embed within services or collaborate across teams for cross-cutting work.
• Champion resilience patterns: circuit breakers, graceful degradation, auto-scaling.
• Collaborate on architectural decisions with Enterprise Architecture.
• Partner with product, security, and SRE to align tech decisions with business needs.
• Drive observability improvements: monitoring, alerting, rapid incident response.
• Reduce single points of failure and improve system reliability.
• Apply AI/ML tools to boost developer productivity and automation.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies for performance and velocity.

Skills

Java 17+

Kotlin

Spring WebFlux / Vert.x

Kafka Streams / Flink

gRPC

Distributed systems

Reactive programming

AWS (EKS)

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Observability tooling

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

AWS (EKS)

Helm

Kustomize

Terraform

Job description

Ticketmaster is seeking a Principal Engineer I for the Prepurchase Platform in London. This hands-on role focuses on distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and platform modernization to sustain high-demand on-sales.

You will write production code daily, influence technical direction, and collaborate across multiple teams within the Prepurchase domain. You will drive observability, resilience patterns, and AI-assisted enhancements while embedding across services or working horizontally.