Principal Engineer, Live Nation
Prepurchase Platform
Salary not provided
AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
GraphQL
Java
Kafka
Elasticsearch
Redis
Kotlin
Terraform
Splunk
Prometheus
Spring
Grafana
Flink
WebSocket
Senior and Expert level
Remote from UK
Entertainment events promoter and producer
Be an early applicant
Entertainment events promoter and producer
1001+ employees
B2CLifestyleMusicEntertainmentEvents
Be an early applicant
Salary not provided
AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
GraphQL
Java
Kafka
Elasticsearch
Redis
Kotlin
Terraform
Splunk
Prometheus
Spring
Grafana
Flink
WebSocket
Senior and Expert level
Remote from UK
1001+ employees
B2CLifestyleMusicEntertainmentEvents
Company mission
To help live music fans more easily and quickly find concert tickets and information about their favourite artists and venues.
Role
Who you are
- Proven ability to reason about distributed systems tradeoffs - scalability, consistency, availability, latency and make defensible design decisions under real constraints. This is the core bar for this role
- Proven experience writing production code and building high-traffic systems at scale - this is a coding role first
- Expertise in Java (17+); and the JVM, with strong command of JVM internals, garbage collection behavior, and performance tuning under load. Kotlin is a plus
- 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) - structuring code around how data is laid out, accessed, and transformed for cache efficiency and throughput, rather than around object hierarchies
- Experience with compact, search-oriented data structures (e.g. RoaringBitmap, succinct/bitset representations) for representing large in-memory state efficiently. Experience with search engines (Elasticsearch, Solr) for discovery workloads is a plus
- 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. Understands that failures emerge from system interactions and missing feedback loops - not just broken components. Evaluates designs by asking why they exist and what constraints shaped them, not just whether they match a preferred pattern
- Technical Vision: Anticipates platform challenges and designs systems that scale ahead of demand
- Domain Depth: Before changing a system, invests in understanding it fully - its history, the teams and services it interacts with, the constraints that shaped its current design, and the forces
- Ownership: Takes end-to-end responsibility for system health, performance, and reliability across the Prepurchase domain
- Influence Without Authority: Drives architectural decisions and engineering standards through collaboration, not hierarchy
- Communication: Explains complex technical trade-offs clearly to both engineering peers and non-technical stakeholders
- Composure Under Pressure: Stays calm during high-severity incidents and high-demand on-sales, delivering clear resolutions
- Continuous Improvement: Identifies opportunities to modernize, simplify, and strengthen systems - and follows through
What the job involves
- 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: you will reason carefully about distributed systems tradeoffs, understand why existing designs exist before proposing changes, and act on problems without waiting to be asked
- You will lead platform modernization efforts, design event-driven architectures, and deliver systems that remain resilient during the highest-demand on-sales, working across multiple teams within the Prepurchase domain rather than within a single service area
- The platforms you work on have no single correct implementation; they are a continuous series of tradeoff decisions made under real constraints
- Your value comes from understanding those tradeoffs clearly and improving them deliberately, not from implementing solutions in a vacuum
- This is a hands-on technical role with no direct reports
- You will write production code daily, influence technical direction, and partner with teams across Ticketmaster on cross-cutting architectural decisions
- Depending on team needs, you may embed deeply within a single service area or work horizontally across multiple teams, the role flexes to where the highest-impact work is
- Identify and act on production problems without being prompted. A single 500 error reaching a fan is a problem, not a data point; treat it accordingly and act with urgency regardless of volume
- 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
Our take
Live Nation is the world's leading live entertainment company, sitting at the top of the market in live events and ticketing. Formed in 2005, it is a major international company, with key business segments made up of concerts, ticketing, and sponsorship and advertising.
Despite its dominant position in the market, the company saw an 84% drop in revenue during 2020 and the closure of live events. Since then, however, demand has been stronger than ever for their ticket sales. This is a reflection that live events remain a clear priority for consumers and has been further reflected in Live Nation's acquisitions of companies - like Goodlive - that complement and bolster Live Nation's portfolio.
In addition to live events, a key area to watch for Live Nation will be the rise of online concert streaming, like that undertaken by competitors such as Driift. Major festivals such as Glastonbury have trialled online concerts with mixed reviews. If it proves successful, this could be a major new section of the entertainment market and a big potential part of Live Nation's future ventures.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
11% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company benefits
- HEALTH: Medical, Dental and Vision benefits for you and your family, including Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) and Health Savings Accounts (HSAs)
- YOURSELF: Paid time off policy including holidays, sick time, and day off for your birthday, free concert tickets
- WEALTH: 401(k) program with company match, Stock Program Reimbursement
- FAMILY: New parent programs & support including caregiver leave and baby bonus, infertility support
- CAREER: Tuition reimbursement, student loan repayment internal growth and development programs & trainings
- OTHERS: Volunteer time off, crowdfunding network
Company HQ
Beverly Hills, CA
Leadership
Michael Rapino
(CEO & President)Michael joined Live Nation Entertainment in 2005 as CEO and President. Previously, he spent 10 years in various Marketing and Entertainment roles at Labatt's Breweries of Canada. He also held several roles at Clear Channel Communications, including CEO and President of Global Music.
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