Principal Software Engineer Marketplace

TL;DR

Principal Software Engineer Marketplace: Lead the engineering strategy and delivery for the marketplace platform powering the core purchase funnel, with an accent on distributed systems, reliability during peak traffic, and architectural evolution. Focus on improving the full funnel from discovery through booking and post-purchase engagement, including search/discoverability, checkout/payments, experimentation, and incident readiness.

Location: Madrid

Company

hirify.global is a global live-entertainment discovery and booking technology platform.

What you will do

• Own engineering strategy, roadmap delivery, quality bar, reliability, and architectural evolution for the marketplace domain.
• Partner with Product, Design, Data, Commercial, and Operations to improve the full funnel from discovery through booking and post-purchase engagement.
• Drive traffic resilience and operational excellence: readiness for peaks/launches, incident response, observability, and capacity planning.
• Improve marketplace systems across search and discoverability, pricing and conversion, checkout and payments, post-purchase servicing, and experimentation.
• Balance short-term growth with long-term platform health by simplifying architecture and investing in the next bottleneck.
• Set operating mechanisms (planning, technical reviews, dependency management, staffing plans, engineering metrics, and post-incident learning) and help shape engineering standards, including AI-enabled productivity.

Requirements

• 10+ years in software engineering with substantial experience leading engineering leaders and cross-functional, product-facing organizations.
• Proven experience leading multiple teams through managers, ideally in marketplace/checkout/discovery/growth/consumer-trust or adjacent funnel-heavy domains.
• Strong technical judgment in distributed systems, modern cloud infrastructure, APIs/integrations, mobile/web product systems, observability, and incident management.
• Experience owning or deeply partnering on at least two areas: search/recommendations, checkout/payments, risk/fraud/trust, retention/lifecycle/post-purchase, internationalisation/localisation, high-traffic consumer web/mobile.
• Ability to translate commercial goals into engineering priorities using metrics, experimentation, and clear trade-off decisions.
• Track record improving engineering maturity: planning discipline, staffing models, quality systems, architecture review, delivery predictability, and leadership development.

Nice to have

• Experience in ticketing, travel, e-commerce, food delivery, gaming commerce, consumer fintech, or classifieds.
• Experience with search, ranking, personalisation, or recommendation systems.
• Experience with payments, refund flows, fraud prevention, identity, or regulated transaction systems.
• Familiarity with AI/ML-enabled product features and using AI to improve product relevance or engineering productivity.
• Experience supporting global, localised consumer products with multiple payment methods, regions, and traffic patterns.

Culture & Benefits

• Compensation package with base salary and potential bonus for top performance.
• Stock options.
• Health insurance and flexible remuneration with a 100% tax exemption through Cobee.
• Home office friendly.
• English and Spanish lessons.
• Possibility to receive in advance part of your salary via Payflow.