Principal Software Engineer

ABOUT VICTORY LIVE Victory Live is a private equity backed technology company aimed at maximizing distribution and yield for live event ticket inventory. We provide an end-to-end software platform for the live ticketing industry, managing thousands of sports, theater, and live music event tickets on behalf of artists, promoters, teams, venues, and professional resellers. Victory Live's comprehensive offerings include an established B2B marketplace along with both a full-service and an automated SaaS platform to handle all elements of the ticket sales lifecycle, from ingestion to sales fulfillment. THE POSITION The Principal Engineer is one of the most senior technical voices at Victory Live. You'll work across teams to set engineering direction, partner with technical leadership on systems that have to be right for the long haul, and serve as a thought partner to engineering leadership on where we as a team and platform are headed. You're an IC, but your scope is the whole org: your influence shows up in other people's code, decisions, and growth, not just your own commits. RESPONSIBILITIES • Set engineering direction across teams. Guide decisions on systems, languages, frameworks, and patterns so they ladder up to company strategy, not just local optima. • Lead our largest, most complex initiatives such as multi-team initiatives and business critical strategic imperatives  • Partner with Architects, the Head of Product Engineering, and the executive team on long-range platform strategy, build/buy/partner calls, and major investment tradeoffs. • Define and evolve best practices across teams, code, design, review, testing, observability, and AI-assisted engineering. Drive adoption and improvement, not solely documentation.  • Be the org's AI engineering thought leader. Decide where agentic workflows, code generation, and AI tooling earn their keep; pilot to test and learn and remove things that do not work.  • Solve the technical problems no one else can crack such as performance, scale, reliability, cross-system correctness and document how you did it so the team learns. • Develop engineers into stronger team members and contributors, preparing them and us for what comes next.. • Hold the long-term line on scalability, security, and maintainability when shorter-term incentives push the other way. • Help define engineering standards enforced across the entire organization. REQUIREMENTS • 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of cross-team technical leadership at growth-stage or larger companies. • Demonstrated impact on architecture and engineering practice at the org level — not just on a single team. • Deep technical breadth: backend systems, API design, data, infrastructure, and at least one of web/mobile/platform. • Track record of introducing AI/ML or AI-assisted-development tooling into production engineering workflows and measurably improving developer productivity or code quality. • Excellent written communication as your design docs, RFCs, and postmortems should set the standard for the org. • Comfort operating with ambiguity and a bias toward structured execution over analysis paralysis.PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS • Background in live events, sports, entertainment, marketplaces, or high-transaction consumer platforms. • Experience as a credible technical voice in M&A, partner integrations, or vendor selection. • Experience working with onshore + offshore distributed teams without sacrificing quality.WHY VICTORY LIVE • You'll build the infrastructure live events run on; millions of tickets, hundreds of venues, many of the largest teams and events in the world. • A lean team where decisions move fast and your code reaches real fans, often the same week. • Every release has stakes. Every improvement is felt. • High expectations, low tolerance for politics, and a culture built on writing well and shipping with care. ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES We are a remote-first, AI-native engineering team. Here is what that looks like in practice: • AI-assisted engineering. Every engineer uses Claude, Claude Code, Copilot, and agentic tooling as a routine part of their workflow. • Remote-ready, async-first. Most decisions happen in writing through Jira, Confluence, PR descriptions, design docs. We over-communicate on changes and under-communicate on noise. • Ownership mindset. Engineers are responsible for what they write and no code reaches production without review. Reviewers are co-owners. • Observability is part of "done." If the on-call engineer can't understand a system without reading source, more logging, metrics, and dashboards are needed. • Preservation of quality of code and life. We write code that is clean, tested, and maintainable so it serves us well over time, and we build sustainable processes so no one burns out or becomes a single point of failure. • Shared knowledge and continued education. We grow as a team by learning from each other through reviews, documentation, and c