Senior Software Engineer – Python

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 Sr. Software Engineer on our Python and FastAPI services is the engine room of our engineering org. You will lead projects from planning through execution, write the code on the hardest pieces, and raise the bar for the engineers around you. You'll also be a force multiplier for AI-assisted development on your team, modeling how to use Claude, Copilot, and agentic workflows to ship faster without compromising quality. RESPONSIBILITIES • Lead delivery of more in-depth initiatives from planning through launch in partnership with product and technical leadership, where you own the technical execution • Take on the hard parts. When a FastAPI service needs a rewrite or a hard data migration, you're the one writing it • Shape architecture. Participate actively in design discussions on our Python services, write design docs, and weigh tradeoffs out loud so the team can learn from your reasoning • Mentor mid-level and junior engineers. Pair, code-review thoughtfully, and help teammates level up their skills, including their AI tooling fluency • Drive process improvements. Spot recurring pain in the team's workflow and propose changes, not just complaints • Push the AI-native bar. Build internal tooling, prompt patterns, and agentic workflows that make the whole team faster, not just yourself • Be a reliable code reviewer on PRs across the team, including outside your immediate project area • Operate cleanly on-call. Know your services in production; lead incident response when needed and write the postmortem REQUIREMENTS • 5+ years building production software, with strong depth in Python and FastAPI (or a comparable async web framework) • Demonstrated ability to make sound architectural decisions in a Python service and explain tradeoffs clearly in writing • Strong technical depth in backend systems, API design, or distributed services built in Python • Mentorship experience and a track record of helping teammates grow • Fluent, deliberate use of AI tooling across the full engineering lifecycle (design, code, test, debug, review, docs) PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS • Experience with Celery, SQLAlchemy at scale, and Kafka-backed event pipelines • Experience leading projects in marketplace, ticketing, e-commerce, or two-sided platform environments • Comfort with Datadog, Grafana, Kibana, Airbrake, Sentry, OpsGenie, or comparable production tooling 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 OUR VALUES We build the systems that power live event ticketing, and we hold a high bar for how we do it. Four principles run through everything: • Quality of life. Sustainable processes over heroics. Nobody should be a single point of failure, and nobody should be afraid to take a vacation • Quality of code. Clarity over cleverness. If a teammate needs a long explanation to follow your code, it needs simplifying. Tests prove your work; they aren't optional • Protection of production. Every change is reviewed, tested, and observable. We build with monitoring in mind from day one so we find problems before our users do • Shared knowledge. We work across time zones, so we communicate in the open. Questions go in channels, not DMs, and one answer becomes shared knowledge ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES We are an 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 • 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 ser