Principal Software Engineer (AI)

TL;DR

Principal Software Engineer (AI/Backend): Setting the technical direction and platform strategy for a live event ticketing marketplace with an accent on scalability, reliability, and AI-integrated engineering. Focus on designing high-transaction systems, leading complex cross-team initiatives, and implementing agentic AI workflows to improve developer productivity.

Location: Remote (US)

Company

A private equity-backed technology company providing an end-to-end software platform for the live ticketing industry.

What you will do

• Set engineering direction across teams, guiding decisions on systems, languages, frameworks, and patterns.
• Lead the most complex, business-critical strategic initiatives and multi-team projects.
• Collaborate with the executive team and Architects on long-range platform strategy and build/buy/partner decisions.
• Act as the organization's AI engineering thought leader, piloting agentic workflows and AI tooling to improve productivity.
• Solve critical technical challenges regarding performance, scale, and cross-system correctness.
• Mentor and develop engineers into stronger contributors to elevate overall organizational technical capability.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of org-level technical leadership at growth-stage or larger companies.
• Deep technical breadth across backend systems, API design, data, infrastructure, and at least one client-side platform.
• Proven experience introducing AI/ML or AI-assisted development tools into production engineering workflows.
• Exceptional written communication skills for creating high-standard design docs, RFCs, and postmortems.
• Must be eligible to work in the US (based on federal and state law compliance).

Nice to have

• Background in live events, sports, entertainment, marketplaces, or high-transaction consumer platforms.
• Experience as a technical lead in M&A, partner integrations, or vendor selection.
• Experience working with distributed onshore and offshore teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first and async-first culture prioritizing written communication via Jira and Confluence.
• AI-native engineering environment where tools like Claude and GitHub Copilot are routine.
• Strong ownership mindset with mandatory peer reviews and a focus on high-quality, maintainable code.
• Emphasis on observability and sustainable processes to ensure work-life balance and prevent burnout.
• Fast-paced environment where releases have high stakes and immediate impact on millions of fans.