Lead Platform Engineer (Remote, United Kingdom)

Job Summary:

Location: Remote, United Kingdom

Division: Ticketmaster

Contract Terms: Permanent, 40 hours per week

THE TEAM

The Platform engineering team build and runs a large, complicated, resilient, and reliable distributed systems that operate at huge scale. Our focus is around continual improvement of systems - ensuring our capacity / saturation is optimal, and looking for opportunities to improve performance, simplify infrastructure and architecture, eliminate work that doesn’t directly add value, through automation, and provide information and actionable insights to help understand our systems when they inevitably misbehave. You will be part of the Marketplace Platform Engineering Team, which is responsible for the stability of our systems, the team is fully working with the engineer teams to deploy all requirements and keep the systems safe. The role is remote, but there is the option to work in any Ticketmaster office, and the team convene to work together throughout the year.

Our goal is to have a high vision of our Kubernetes deployment with a level of standardisation over Marketplace. We need to be on top of all pieces, from our CDN, deployment pipeline over all our environments, testing our applications.

THE JOB

You will be working with various development teams across US and EU time zones, most of whom have services deployed in Kubernetes, either on-prem (Rancher) or in AWS (EKS), so we would expect you to have experience of K8s or similar container orchestration platforms.

We have many complex and highly distributed systems, spanning decades of history, so we would expect you to be comfortable working in a complex, multi-technology platform. Our business model demands that we sustain exceptional high traffic at specific times, so staying calm and being able to troubleshoot under high pressure is essential. 

Our team works closely with engineers developing a wide range of fan-facing services, and we would expect you to integrate quickly with these teams and with your own team members, mindful of the challenges posed by different time zones and first languages (less than a third of our team speak English as a first language). Networking with engineers across the organisation is an important part of what we do, so we would expect you to build connections with senior engineers across Ticketmaster. We believe that monitoring, alerting, and observability are foundational to reliability, so we would want you to be contributing to continuous improvement of measuring and alerting on both potential causes and symptoms, as we define service level indicators and objectives, and strive to meet them.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

• Support the full system lifecycle for automation and tools including the design, assessment, selection, commissioning, validation, and implementation of systems.
• Provide input into the design, development and implementation of systems automation and tooling for software engineering teams to achieve their goals.
• Work closely with peers in software engineering teams to implement solutions that are scalable, secure, and easily maintained.
• Provide infrastructure support for B2C products both in the public cloud and on premise.
• Develop tools, both command line and web based, that are responsible for maintenance and management functions of development and production systems.
• Work with systems and software engineers to develop and document requirements and functional specifications.
• Implement monitoring, health check scripts, functional and load testing.
• Manage and improve our CDN and traffic on the edge.
• Guarantee a level of standardisation over all our applications.
• Collaborating with engineer teams and understand the requirements.
• Write new process and improve the current one. Documentation is crucial to work around with team around the world.
• Part of the team decisions such as projects, roadmaps
• Challenging the team and the projects during our team meetings is more than welcome.
• On call rotation to respond any critical alerts, reduce the number of alerts in important.
• Working with more junior and support members, they will need your expertise and qualification to understand some situation.
• You will work with the other leads to be sure all aspects of the projects are covered.
• Pair with other team members to provide support and share knowledge.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW (or TECHNICAL SKILLS)

Minimum Qualifications:

• Incident management
• Share knowledge and skills with other team members
• At least one script language is necessary (most of team members know bash, python, go, ruby …)
• Excellent knowledge of high-level languages such as Python or batch scripting
• Previous experience of public clouds
• Standardisation tools such as terraform
• Significant experience working with CMS at large scale.
• Knowledge and experience of containers and Kubernetes cluster
• Knowledge of Gitlab CI-CD
• Technical writing skills for documenting environments and procedures

Preferred Qualifications:

• Proven years’ experience in distributed systems
• A strong understanding of core network protocols and services
• A strong Linux experience as system engineer (RHEL, centos, CoreOS)
• Experience architecting, developing, and troubleshooting systems
• Solid knowledge of working with third party APIs
• Experience with automation tools (Chef, Ansible, …)
• Experience with monitoring and alerting system

YOU (BEHAVIOURAL SKILLS)

• Autonomous and proactive.
• Strong attention to detail.
• Self-motivated, energetic, and tenacious.
• Able to work as part of a team as well as independently.
• Enjoy working in cross functional and multidisciplinary teams.
• Flexible and pragmatic.
• Strong organisational skills and time management.
• A desire to learn and use a broad range of skills in a highly complex environment.
• Excellent analytical, problem solving and resolution skills.
• A keen interest in new technologies and open source.
• Passionate about automation and tooling.
• Projects leader and proactive in providing solutions.
   

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 at a company dedicated to helping millions of fans experience it, we want to hear from you.

Our work is guided by our values:

Reliability - We understand that fans and clients rely on us to power their live event experiences, and we rely on each other to make it happen.

Teamwork - We believe individual achievement pales in comparison to the level of success that can be achieved by a team

Integrity - We are committed to the highest moral and ethical standards on behalf of the countless partners and stakeholders we represent

Belonging - We are committed to building a culture in which all people can be their authentic selves, have an equal voice and opportunities to thrive

EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES

We are passionate and committed to our people and go beyond the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion. You will be working in an inclusive environment and be encouraged to bring your whole self to work. We will do all that we can to help you successfully balance your work and homelife. As a growing business we will encourage you to develop your professional and personal aspirations, enjoy new experiences, and learn from the talented people you will be working with. It's talent that matters to us and we encourage applications from people irrespective of their gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability status or caring responsibilities. #LI-JCK #LI-Remote