Principal Site Reliability Engineer

Job Description

Principal Software Engineer I

Location: UK

Division: Ticketmaster

Line Manager: Senior Director, Software Engineering

Contract Terms: Regular/Full-Time

THE TEAM

A career at Ticketmaster will challenge and engage you. We support the creators and producers of shows and live performances, while connecting more passionate fans to these events. The pace here is fast, the atmosphere is fun and a passion for live events is a common thread that ties us together. As a global and growing business, we can truly offer a world of opportunities to expand your skills and develop your career. Visit any of our offices and you'll find a diverse mix of passionate employees, helping fans around the globe connect with the artists, teams and events they love. It truly is a unique and rewarding environment.

You will be part of the Central SRE team, which is responsible for increasing adoption and maturity of SRE principles across Ticketmaster, and ensuring all our services, public-facing and business-to-business are appropriately scaled and reliable.

The role is remote, but there is the option to work in any Ticketmaster office, for the team to convene to work together throughout the year. We support teams across the globe, with many peers in the USA. Most of your team members will operate in UTC/UTC+1 but we are adding people in other timezones.

THE JOB

As a principal site reliability engineer you will be working with software engineering teams and platform engineering teams throughout Ticketmaster across a range of technology from old and esoteric to modern and mainstream. The team is active in four broad areas, and you will be expected to contribute to at least three, depending on best fit.

As a team, we are systematically tackling services and user journeys across the diverse Ticketmaster ecosystem, understanding system dependencies and boundaries, implicit and explicit reliability expectations, and agreeing achievable and aspirational targets for reliability. We work out what we need to measure to track performance against these targets, and where necessary make improvements to, or introduce telemetry.
Once we have started collecting emprical evidence of system reliability, we work with engineering teams and product owners to help balance reliability engineering and feature work, and provide support iterating on and refining reliability targets and instrumentation.

Through a combination of the reliability target discovery process and system archaeology, and through participation in incident resolution and post incident response, we identify problems and opportunities to improve. This ranges from investigations into application performance and behaviour, resulting in merge requests for engineering teams, to migrations from legacy infrastructures to kubernetes.

We build tooling and platform capabilities, in partnership with our internal platform engineering teams, to facilitate SRE adoption, improving visibilty of system performance and business performance. Our team also works to evangelise and coach SRE concepts throughout the organisation, to support emerging groups practicing SRE, and to shift-left, ensuring reliabiblity and resilience are front of mind from product inception, and that good practices are followed in the development of new services.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING
• Engaging at all stages of the development lifecycle of both greenfield and brownfield services to ensure appropriate resilience and reliability
• Partner with Product and Engineering peers to agree measurable reliability targets (SLOs), helping with instrumentation, visualise, alerting, and decision-making
• Uncover, document, test, and put SLOs around previously unrecognised system boundaries throughout Ticketmaster
• Provide consulting and coaching to software engineering teams on platforms, frameworks, capacity planning, and production readiness
• Oversee system health by measuring and monitoring golden signals
• Scale systems sustainably through automation, load testing, and analysis of current performance
• Partipate in incident response and post incident review to improve time to detect and time to resolve
• Improve system reliability and health by making tactical improvements to code bases, deployment pipelines and infrastructure, system architecture, and telemetry
• Develop tooling and services to support SRE adoption and acceleration throughout Ticketmaster

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW (or TECHNICAL SKILLS)
• 6-8 years experience as a Software Engineer
• Experience programming in one or more of the following languages: C, C++, C#, Java, Go, Rust, Ruby, Python, Perl
• Experience with Linux/Unix system internals and administration and/or algorithms and data structures
• Experience architecting, developing, and troubleshooting systems

Perferred Qualifications
• Demonstrable knowledge and experience in computer science, either by formal academic study or practical experience
• 8-10 years experience in distributed systems, storage systems, or databases
• Experience in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems
• Experience in MySQL or Postgres
• Systematic problem-solving approach
• Excellent communication skills, wrirten, verbal, and diagramatic

YOU (BEHAVIOURAL SKILLS)
• Patience - although driven, you recognize that Ticketmaster is a big, complex, sometimes slow-moving place - change takes time
• Curiosity - you like to push the boundaries of what you know, and are not content to accept ''because'' as a reason
• Humility - you understand your own tendency to error, and in discussion with others avoid being over-bearing
• Service - we value servant leadership - we exist to help other teams deliver value
• Relationship building - you can network and build trust with people across the organisation
• Persuasion - you are able to appeal both to logic and data but also feelings and emotion to bring people on board with our recommendations
• Perseverenace - you are not easily discouraged, and are willing to keep trying to solve a problem from different angles
• Comfortable with ambiguity - you understand that the world is not black and white, and that sometimes things are not as they seem, or we don't or cannot have all the facts, and that's OK.
• Kindess - you operate from a position of compassion, and not ego. You understand and are mindful of other peoples feelings and fears.
• Simplicity - you favour simple solutions, avoid gold-plating, and optimise around the YAGNI principle
• Not Striving - you understand that working hard is not the same as working well - you take breaks, value family and personal time, and don't feel that your value is defined by the work you do
• Taste - you appreciate quality and pride of workmanship

LIFE AT TICKETMASTER

We are proud to be a part of Live Nation Entertainment, the world's largest live entertainment company.
Our vision at Ticketmaster is to connect people around the world to the live events they love. As the world's largest ticket marketplace and the leading global provider of enterprise tools and services for the live entertainment business, we are uniquely positioned to successfully deliver on that vision.

We do it all with an intense passion for Live and an inspiring and diverse culture driven by accessible leaders, attentive managers, and enthusiastic teams. If you're passionate about live entertainment like we are, and you want to work a

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Jobcode: Reference SBJ-r7872p-3-145-177-28-42 in your application.