Principal Engineer I — Prepurchase Platform

• Job Summary
• Principal Engineer I, Prepurchase Platform
• Division: Ticketmaster UK Limited
• Line Manager: VP Engineering, Accounts, Identity and Pre-purchase
• Contract Terms: Full-time permanent, 40 hours per week
• Team Overview

The Prepurchase Platform group owns backend services that power every fan's path to a ticket, handling event discovery, real‑time seat availability, and interactive venue experiences at massive scale.

Engineers build fast, resilient, and highly available systems capable of processing billions of API calls during peak on‑sales.

Role Overview

As a Principal Engineer, you will write code, build systems, and solve complex problems hands‑on.

You will reason carefully about distributed‑systems trade‑offs, lead platform modernization efforts, design event‑driven architectures, and maintain high‑reliability during high‑demand on‑sales, collaborating across multiple teams within the Prepurchase domain.

Responsibilities

• Identify and act on production problems without prompting; treat any single 500 error reaching a fan as a problem to solve urgently.
• 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/g RPC to enable real‑time data flow across services.
• Embed deeply in specific service areas or work horizontally across teams to solve cross‑cutting problems.
• Champion resilience patterns such as 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, instrument services for monitoring, alerting, and rapid incident response.
• Identify and eliminate single points of failure, improving 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.
• Technical Skills
• Proven ability to reason about distributed‑systems trade‑offs in scalability, consistency, availability, latency, and design defensible solutions under real constraints.
• Strong experience writing production code and building high‑traffic systems at scale.
• Expertise in Java (17+) and JVM internals, garbage collection, and performance tuning under load. Kotlin experience is a plus.
• Hands‑on experience with a reactive, non‑blocking framework (Vert. x, Spring Web Flux, 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.

Rocks DB) at scale.

• Strong command of g RPC (including streaming RPC) and binary serialization formats such as Flat Buffers, Avro, or Protobuf with schema evolution via a registry.
• Familiarity with Data‑Oriented Design for cache‑efficient code and efficient in‑memory state representation.
• Experience with compact, search‑oriented data structures (e. g. Roaring Bitmap, succinct/bitset representations) for large in‑memory state.
• Optional: Search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr) for discovery workloads, microservice design, service mesh (Istio/Envoy), API contract evolution, and backend‑for‑frontend patterns including Graph QL APIs and Web Socket subscriptions.
• Hands‑on experience with AWS (EKS) and cloud‑native operations – Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Kustomize, Terraform.
• Proficiency with caching strategies (Redis, CDN caching) and high‑traffic systems.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines (Git Lab CI) and progressive deployment strategies (blue‑green, canary).
• Experience designing for high availability – multi‑region active‑active/active‑passive architectures, failover strategies, disaster recovery, and resilience under abuse.
• Proficiency with AI/ML tools and techniques – using LLMs, AI‑assisted development, and automation to accelerate engineering workflows.
• Familiarity with observability tooling: Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, Open Tracing, 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.
• Behavioural Skills
• Systems Thinking – understand distributed systems as a set of trade‑offs, recognize failures emerging from system interactions and missing feedback loops.
• Technical Vision – anticipate platform challenges and design systems that scale ahead of demand.
• Domain Depth – invest effort in understanding systems fully before changing them, including history and constraints.
• Ownership – take end‑to‑end responsibility for system health, performance, and reliability across the Prepurchase domain.
• Influence Without Authority – drive architectural decisions and engineering standards through collaboration, not hierarchy.
• Communication – explain complex technical trade‑offs clearly to peers and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Composure Under Pressure – remain calm during high‑severity incidents and high‑demand on‑sales, delivering clear resolutions.
• Continuous Improvement – identify opportunities to modernise, simplify, and strengthen systems and follow through.
• Equal Opportunity Statement

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 help you balance work and home life, support your professional and personal aspirations, and provide equal opportunities irrespective of gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability status or caring responsibilities.

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