Head of Product Engineering

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, promotors, 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
As Head of Engineering, you will own the technical delivery, organizational health, and engineering culture at Victory Live. You'll lead a multi-disciplinary team spanning product engineering, platform, and distributed ops and serve as a critical partner to the COO and Product leadership as we scale our marketplace, distribution integrations, and venue technology. This is a seat at the leadership table. You'll shape how we build, not just what we build.

RESPONSIBILITIES 

• Lead and grow a team of engineers across web, mobile, platform, and API domains, including both onshore and distributed offshore teams.
• Define and execute the strategy for AI enablement within the engineering organization, driving the adoption of AI-assisted tools and workflows to enhance developer productivity and code quality.
• Lead the organizational and technical transition of existing teams toward AI-assisted engineering practices, including code generation, automated testing, and accelerated CI/CD pipelines.
• Own engineering execution: delivery cadence, incident management, release quality, and regression reduction.
• Drive architectural decisions across VL1 (our core platform), marketplace distribution integrations, and partner-facing APIs.
• Partner with Product and Operations to define the roadmap and ensure technical strategy aligns with business priorities.
• Build and reinforce an engineering culture that values accountability, observability, and customer outcomes, not just velocity.
• Lead technical evaluation for partnerships and acquisitions, including third-party platform integrations and white-label solutions.
• Serve as the engineering owner for strategic initiatives, coordinating across internal teams, distribution partners, and venue clients.
• Develop direct reports into senior contributors and future leads; create clear growth paths across the engineering org.

REQUIREMENTS

• 10+ years in software engineering, with 5+ years in an engineering management or leadership role.
• Experience leading distributed or multi-functional teams at a growth-stage company.
• Proven experience introducing and scaling AI/ML tooling (e.g., code assistants, testing copilots) into production engineering workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to lead organizational change and train/mentor existing teams through a transition to AI-assisted development practices.
• Track record of improving engineering quality; fewer incidents, faster recovery, more reliable releases.
• Strong technical depth in API design, backend systems, and platform architecture.
• Ability to evaluate build vs. buy vs. partner decisions with clear-eyed risk assessment.
• Strong communicator: comfortable bridging engineering and executive stakeholders.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward structured execution over analysis paralysis.
• Collaborative operator who earns trust quickly with both ICs and leadership.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Background in live events, sports, entertainment, or high-transaction consumer platforms.
• Familiarity with Jira/Atlassian tooling, Zendesk integrations, or ticket distribution APIs.
• Experience managing teams through large-scale live events with hard deadlines (sports, concerts, festivals).
• Prior involvement in M&A technical diligence or integration scoping.
• Experience working in marketplace, ticketing, e-commerce, or two-sided platform environments.
• Skilled at managing offshore or distributed team structures for cost efficiency without quality tradeoff.

OUR STACK & WAYS OF WORKING

• Jira / Atlassian
• Anthropic / Claude Code 
• REST APIs
• Marketplace integrations
• Mobile & web engineering
• Distributed teams
• Agile / sprint cadences
• Incident management
• Ticketing & inventory systems

WHY VICTORY LIVE

• You'll lead engineering at a company processing real scale with millions of tickets, hundreds of venues, and many of the largest teams and events in the world.
• Lean leadership team means your decisions matter and move fast.
• We're building infrastructure that live events runs on; every release has stakes, and every improvement is felt by real fans.
• Collaborative culture with high expectations and low tolerance for politics.

Victory Live is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, creed, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, gender expression, Veteran status, or another other characteristic protected by state, local or federal law.