Engineering Manager, Core Services

Engineering Manager, Core Services

Vivid Seats

Join to apply for the Engineering Manager, Core Services role at Vivid Seats
.

Founded in 2001, Vivid Seats (NASDAQ: SEAT) is a leading online ticket marketplace committed to becoming the ultimate partner for connecting fans to the live events, artists, and teams they love. We believe in the power of experiences and are fiercely dedicated to building products that inspire human connections. Named as one of Built In's top places to work in 2025, we believe that our People are our greatest competitive advantage.

To support our People, we have built a company culture that empowers our employees to embrace challenges, encourages unity through collaboration, and seeks to constantly evolve by leveraging data and inspiring innovation.

We believe in harnessing emerging technology to power performance and unlock creativity. As part of our culture of innovation, we actively embrace the use of AI tools to enhance decision‑making, improve workflows, and produce better outcomes for our customers.

We are seeking an experienced and innovative Software Engineering Manager to lead one of our Core Services Engineering teams at Vivid Seats. This backend‑focused team designs, builds, and operates shared services and APIs that power our web, mobile, Customer Experience and other applications.

You will manage a team of software and quality engineers responsible for mission‑critical platform services, with a strong emphasis on API design, scalability, performance, and reliability. You will help define and uphold service‑level objectives and SLAs, establish strong observability practices (including metrics, logging, and alerting), and lead effective incident response and post‑incident learning.

In this role, you will guide architectural decisions, promote operational excellence, and ensure our services are resilient, well‑documented, and easy to consume across the Vivid Seats ecosystem. At Vivid Seats, you will have the opportunity to shape the foundation of the platform – building highly available systems that enable world‑class customer experiences and support the continued evolution of the ticket marketplace.

In addition to bringing Engineering best practices, you will develop a collaborative, cross‑disciplinary and high‑performing team while overseeing and improving organizational design, structure, priorities, management processes and reporting information systems.

You will be responsible for hiring and promoting talent while building productive, value‑added partnerships with stakeholders. You will also be integral in building an engaged corporate culture. "How" results are achieved will be as important as "what" is achieved.

• Demonstrate deep fluency in designing and operating high‑volume, transactional backend systems built with Spring and Spring Boot, deployed on AWS, and backed by data stores such as MySQL RDS and Snowflake, supporting revenue‑critical applications including order and payment processing.
• Partner with product managers, business stakeholders, and dependent engineering teams to define, design, and deliver new backend capabilities and shared services that support web and mobile applications.
• Identify and drive opportunities to evolve, scale, and optimize our backend services and API strategy, ensuring performance, reliability, and ease of consumption across the platform.
• Lead complex backend initiatives, serving as a technical subject‑matter expert in service design, system architecture, implementation, deployment, and operational support within a fast‑paced Agile environment.
• Provide strong technical leadership and input into service‑level design and architecture decisions, driving innovation in scalability, resiliency, data flow, and integration patterns.
• Hire, develop, and retain a high‑performing team of backend engineers, while contributing to broader engineering talent, culture, and organizational initiatives.
• Lead the team to excellence in execution, delivering high‑quality, reliable backend systems and APIs on time and in alignment with defined SLAs and expectations.
• Create…