Senior Platform Engineer

ZipRecruiter; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 135,000 - 165,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading online ticket marketplace in Chicago is seeking a Senior Platform Engineer to enhance the reliability and efficiency of its cloud infrastructure. You will collaborate with various engineering teams, ensure fast software delivery, and contribute to a culture of innovation and customer service.

Benefits

Annual bonus incentives

FLEX PTO

Mental health days

Medical, dental, and vision insurance

401K matching

Discounts for live events

Qualifications

• Experience administering Kubernetes clusters, especially with AWS EKS.
• Familiarity with configuration-as-code tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or Ansible.
• Strong sense of ownership for own work and the team's work.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability, efficiency, and speed of the delivery pipeline.
• Collaborate with cloud engineers and product owners to optimize productivity.
• Drive ongoing performance enhancement across all areas of the cloud platform.

Skills

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD tools

Python

Java

Go

Observability tools

Cloud networking

Job description

Job DescriptionJob Description

Who we are: Founded in 2001, Vivid Seats (NASDAQ: SEAT) is a leading online ticket marketplace committed to becoming the ultimate partner for connecting fans to the live events, artists, and teams they love. We believe in the power of experiences and are fiercely dedicated to building products that inspire human connections. Named as one of Built In's top places to work in 2025, we believe that our People are our greatest competitive advantage. To support our People, we have built a company culture that empowers our employees to embrace challenges, encourages unity through collaboration, and seeks to constantly evolve by leveraging data and inspiring innovation.

The Opportunity:

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will own the reliability, efficiency, and speed of our delivery pipeline; and help drive ongoing reliability, scalability, and security of our core cloud-based infrastructure platforms (primarily AWS). Your top priority will be ensuring our product teams can deliver software to production as quickly and safely as possible while building and maintaining a stable platform. You will be challenged to deliver in a unique ecosystem with highly burstable traffic patterns.

How your role contributes to the success of Vivid Seats:

• As part of the platform engineering team, you will work closely with fellow cloud engineers, software engineers, security engineers, and product owners to understand their needs and optimize their productivity.
• Collaborate and show desire to support our engineering teams and bring a customer service-focused mindset to our platform engineering practice.
• Utilize tools and processes that help our teams iterate more quickly without sacrificing precision or reliability.
• Plan/design/lead efforts related to automation and tooling, scaling and overall site reliability to enable autonomy and ensure safety. Confident presenting plans and designs to wider architectural community and defending recommended approach.
• Drive ongoing performance enhancement across all areas of our cloud platform; networking, observability, CI/CD, access, security, cost.
• Mentor and collaborate with engineers to deepen our expertise in the DevOps/SRE domain.

How your role expectations will progress as a DevOps Engineer in the first 30, 90, and 180 days:

30 days in

• Complete new hire , gaining the resources you need to be successful.
• Learn how ticket marketplaces operate and how you'll contribute to providing great experiences for our customers.
• Acclimate to team and company norms, business objectives, and Vivid Seats values.
• Develop basic understanding of applications, tech stack, and development process.
• Be comfortable completing basic tasks in various areas of the entire platform domain

90 days in

• Start identifying areas of improvement in our approaches, methods, or technologies to mitigate risks and improve efficiency.
• Build, maintain, and leverage internal and external relationships to achieve progress and advance objectives.
• Make meaningful contributions to team planning, estimations and software design sessions.
• Be a core contributor to ongoing platform projects.
• Be able to support our engineering stakeholders with more advanced requests.

180 days in

• Design and implement process improvements that positively impact the team.
• Mentor others, playing an active role in elevating the skill sets of those you work with.
• Guide the team's work so that it fits into the larger team and engineering group objectives.
• Produce and deliver clean, correct code that drives team and company tech goals forward.
• Improve efficiency in core systems and applications managed by the team and contribute to engineering group objectives.

What you will bring:

• Experience administering Kubernetes clusters (plus if you have experience with AWS EKS).
• Experience working with Kubernetes workloads and core Kubernetes resources.
• Experience with configuration-as-code tools such as Terraform, Pulumi or Ansible.
• Experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, and/or GitHub Actions.
• Familiarity with service mesh/Istio implementations.
• Deep understanding of observability tools such as Datadog
• Expertise in a programming such as Python, Java or Go.
• General understanding of cloud networking.
• Strong sense of ownership for own work and the team's work.
• A passion for automation, optimization, and productivity.
• Ability to lead and mentor colleagues and peers.

Vivid Seats Pay Transparency Disclaimer: Full time offers from Vivid Seats include annual bonus incentives and equity for all employees; FLEX PTO; mental health days; medical, dental, and vision insurance; 401K matching; monthly credits and discounts for attending live events; and a variety of additional workplace perks. The typical starting salary within the full salary range for this position can range. Factors which may affect starting salary include geographic market, relevant skills/experience, education, and other qualifications.Full Salary Range: $135,000 – $165,000 USDhttps://corporate.vividseats.com/careers/

Location: Chicago, IL

We believe in a hybrid 3 days/week in-office working model, which provides employees the flexibility to take advantage of in-person and remote collaboration. Check out our brand new HQ office, bursting with the energy of live events fandom and the vibrancy of Chicago's rising tech scene

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Our Commitment:
We are an equal opportunity employer that values the critical importance of a diverse workforce and sense of belonging. Many of our roles have flexible requirements and we encourage you to apply regardless of whether you meet every qualification.