Lead Full Stack Engineer

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.

We believe in harnessing emerging technology to power performance and unlock creativity. As part of our culture of innovation, we actively embrace the use of AI tools to enhance decision-making, improve workflows, and produce better outcomes for our customers.

The Opportunity:

As a Lead Full Stack Software Engineer on the Distribution team, you'll set the technical direction for the systems powering our partnership platforms - a critical revenue channel for the business. You'll make highly visible enhancements to our platform by maintaining and also building new features across our stack. Our teams work with a variety of applications that enable us to sell tickets, manage inventory, support our partnerships, and provide a great customer experience from the website to the box office.

Following development best practices, you'll be responsible for developing solutions that scale to the needs of our customers and partners.  

How your role contributes to the success of Vivid Seats:

* Lead the design, technical direction, and long-term modernization of the Distribution platform - the services, jobs, and integrations that sync inventory, pricing, and orders with our partners, and the patterns the team will build on for years.

* Take deep ownership of our existing Distribution systems: build a thorough understanding of how they work today, why they were built that way, and where they're heading.

* Set the bar for development, quality and operational excellence, and participate in the team's on-call rotation  

* Grow other engineers through pairing, code reviews, tech talks, and influence who joins the team through interviews and onboarding.

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

30 Days In

* Complete new hire orientation, gaining the resources you need to be successful.

* Learn how ticket marketplaces operate, how Distribution fits into Vivid Seats' business, and who our key partners are.

* Acclimate to team and company norms, business objectives, and Vivid Seats values.

* Build a working map of the Distribution stack - the services, jobs, data stores, and partner integrations the team owns, including legacy systems.

* Deploy and make changes to our production systems, and start building relationships with peers across engineering, product, partner ops, and business.

90 Days In

* Own significant pieces of the Distribution architecture and drive improvements to our processes, methods, and technologies in support of business goals, making pragmatic trade-offs between modernization and short-term delivery.

* Become the go-to person for how our Distribution systems behave - their history, edge cases, and the safe, confident ways to change them.

* Lead team planning, estimations, and design sessions, and represent Distribution's technical position in broader engineering forums.

* Establish a mindset of continuous experimentation on the team and measurably improve delivery efficiency across both modern and long-standing parts of the stack.

* Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to decompose internal and partner objectives into iterative, shippable plans.

* Produce and deliver clean, quality code on critical paths, and raise the bar on code review and design review across the team.

180 Days In

* Use application observability to identify areas for improvement before they become problems for our partners, and coach the team to do the same.

* Be the technical owner for all applications in Distribution's scope, with deep self-sufficiency and a clear point of view on where each is headed.

* Drive a multi-quarter technical roadmap for Distribution - covering both new capabilities and the legacy systems we need to evolve, replace, or retire - that ladders up to company and department goals.

* Identify systemic areas of opportunity in the platform and communicate the impact to stakeholders and leadership.

* Actively grow the engineers on your team - own development plans alongside their managers, and visibly raise the technical ceiling of the group, especially in their ability to work confidently across the full Distribution stack.

What You'll Bring:

* 8+ years of professional experience building and supporting production web applications, including time spent leading technical initiatives that span multiple engineers or teams.

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