Principal Engineer (Remote, United Kingdom)

Live Nation Entertainment; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 60,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is seeking a Principal Engineer for their Payments team, focusing on architecting a next-generation global payment platform. This role involves leading a collaborative team to develop secure, scalable, and cloud-native systems that integrate with major payment providers. You'll be at the forefront of enhancing customer experiences and ensuring platform reliability. With a commitment to innovation and teamwork, this position offers the chance to shape engineering standards while working in an inclusive environment that values diversity and personal growth. If you are passionate about technology and live events, this opportunity is perfect for you.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in building production-grade software at scale.
• Expertise in cloud-native systems and payment platforms is advantageous.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve a globally scalable payment platform.
• Lead a distributed engineering team and mentor engineers.

Skills

Java

Kotlin

Spring Boot

AWS

Kubernetes

Terraform

GitLab CI/CD

Concurrency

Observability

Microservice design

Tools

Docker

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenSearch

Job description

Job Summary:

JOB DESCRIPTION – Principal Engineer – Payments

Location: Remote, United Kingdom

Division: Technology – Payments

Contract Terms: Full-Time, Permanent

THE TEAM

Ticketmaster Payments (TMPayments) is a global initiative delivering a modern, scalable payment platform that powers millions of transactions daily across the Ticketmaster ecosystem. Our team of experienced engineers collaborates to architect and implement secure, high-performance solutions that enable seamless transactions for fans around the world. Working closely with internal stakeholders and external providers, we build and maintain critical infrastructure that ensures reliability, compliance, and global reach.

THE JOB

As a Principal Engineer I on the TMPayments team, you will play a key role in architecting and delivering our next-generation global payment platform. You’ll join a collaborative team of principal engineers to lead the development of secure, scalable, and cloud-native systems designed to integrate with major payment providers and gateways.

This is an exciting time to join Ticketmaster as we transform the way fans experience live events across the globe. You will be at the forefront of designing systems that power high-volume financial flows, improve customer experience, and drive platform reliability and innovation. You’ll have the opportunity to lead a distributed team, mentor engineers, and shape our engineering standards and practices at scale.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

1. Architect and evolve a globally scalable, fault-tolerant payment platform integrating with providers such as Braintree, PayPal, Adyen, and Chase.
2. Provide hands-on leadership in technologies such as Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, Spring Batch, and Spring Cloud Gateway.
3. Champion cloud-native solutions using AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), Terraform, and GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
4. Embed security, resilience, and observability into all parts of the platform architecture.
5. Oversee the platform’s end-to-end performance, ensuring high availability and robust monitoring.
6. Design and implement auto-remediation strategies and reduce on-call incidents to critical-only escalations.
7. Lead a distributed engineering team of full-time staff and contractors, driving best practices in DevOps and continuous delivery.
8. Collaborate closely with Product, UX, and cross-functional teams to define scope, prioritise work, and deliver features on time.
9. Mentor team members in architectural principles, TDD, and coding standards.
10. Align architectural strategy across multiple initiatives with fellow principal engineers.
11. Participate in PI planning, retrospectives, and continuous improvement cycles.
12. Facilitate clear documentation, code guidelines, and platform onboarding for new engineers.
13. Ensure the platform meets operational and compliance standards such as PCI.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW (or TECHNICAL SKILLS)

1. Proven years building production-grade software at scale, preferably in a high-traffic or financial context.
2. Expertise in Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot (classic/reactive), Spring Batch, and Spring Cloud Gateway.
3. Strong grasp of concurrency, JVM tuning, advanced OOP, and robust testing (unit, integration, capacity).
4. Experience with cloud-native systems using AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and microservice design.
5. Familiarity with frontend technologies including ReactJS, NextJS, Material-UI, and GraphQL is a plus.
6. Proven delivery of secure, scalable web apps with backend-for-frontend architecture and CDN integration.
7. Proficiency with monitoring and observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenSearch.
8. Deep understanding of CI/CD practices, GitLab pipelines, infrastructure as code, and centralized monitoring.
9. Track record of mentoring and coaching engineers in distributed teams.
10. Experience in payment platforms or finance technologies is advantageous but not essential.

YOU (BEHAVIOURAL SKILLS)

1. Vision and Adaptability: Proactively anticipates challenges and adapts technical solutions to changing business needs.
2. Ownership and Accountability: Takes end-to-end ownership of platform health, security, and performance.
3. Collaboration and Communication: Works cross-functionally with global teams and communicates clearly with technical and non-technical audiences.
4. Leadership and Mentorship: Builds high-trust environments, nurtures team growth, and leads by example.
5. Composure Under Pressure: Stays calm under critical incidents, delivers clear resolutions, and ensures lasting platform improvements.

LIFE AT TICKETMASTER

We are proud to be a part of Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s largest live entertainment company.

Our vision at Ticketmaster is to connect people around the world to the live events they love. As the world’s largest ticket marketplace and the leading global provider of enterprise tools and services for the live entertainment business, we are uniquely positioned to successfully deliver on that vision.

We do it all with an intense passion for Live and an inspiring and diverse culture driven by accessible leaders, attentive managers, and enthusiastic teams. If you’re passionate about live entertainment like we are, and you want to work at a company dedicated to helping millions of fans experience it, we want to hear from you.

Our work is guided by our values:

1. Reliability – We understand that fans and clients rely on us to power their live event experiences, and we rely on each other to make it happen.
2. Teamwork – We believe individual achievement pales in comparison to the level of success that can be achieved by a team.
3. Integrity – We are committed to the highest moral and ethical standards on behalf of the countless partners and stakeholders we represent.
4. Belonging – We are committed to building a culture in which all people can be their authentic selves, have an equal voice and opportunities to thrive.

EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

We are passionate and committed to our people and go beyond the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion. You will be working in an inclusive environment and be encouraged to bring your whole self to work. We will do all that we can to help you successfully balance your work and home life. As a growing business, we will encourage you to develop your professional and personal aspirations, enjoy new experiences, and learn from the talented people you will be working with. It's talent that matters to us, and we encourage applications from people irrespective of their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability status or caring responsibilities. #LI-JCK #LI-Remote