Playon is looking to evolve its ticketing platform to handle millions of fan moments across web, mobile, and backend services, specifically focusing on digital ticket purchase, redemption, point-of-sale, and event-management experiences in the high-school and youth sports space. The goal is to improve key business metrics like ticket conversion rate, purchase latency, retention, and customer NPS, while reducing error budgets and incidents, and modernizing the technology stack.
Requirements
- Expert knowledge of Java; familiarity with Go, TypeScript/React/React Native; databases (PostgreSQL), stream/event systems (Kafka); data-warehousing (Snowflake) and modern orchestration (AWS EKS/ECS, SQS/SNS).
- Proven experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, especially in e-commerce, ticketing, or event-driven domains.
- Strong system-level thinking — able to balance delivery of features with long-term platform health, performance, scalability and maintainability.
- Experience integrating with Stripe or similar payment platforms preferred.
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent depth) across backend, web and/or mobile systems.
Responsibilities
- Drive architectural and design decisions for ticketing event management, ticket checkout (digital presale and POS), reserved-seating systems, redemption flows and concessions.
- Lead major initiatives such as: migrating microservices from ECS and Lambda to EKS; optimizing performance for high-volume ticket transactions; resolving data-model alignment between ticketing and other domains; improving consistency and maintainability of frontend and backend stacks.
- Drive observability, automated governance and cross-surface reliability (web/mobile/backend) under load.
- Mentor senior engineers and contractors, lead design review forums, own major RFCs, refine engineering process (CI/CD, load testing, monitoring).
- Work with external vendors and partners (payment providers, reserved-seating / scanning hardware, POS integrations), evaluate technical risk, and drive vendor-agnostic solutions that support our scale and flexibility goals.
- Lead the design and delivery of cross-surface systems (backend services, web apps, mobile apps) for ticket purchase, event creation, redemption and reporting, ensuring low-latency, high-throughput and high-availability for peak events.
- Define and drive the roadmap for ticketing systems — modernizing our stack (React/React Native, Java Spring Boot APIs, AWS), enhancing our existing products, and integrating new verticals (youth sports tournaments).
Other
- Ownership over Participation-You take responsibility for achieving holistic outcomes, prioritize key objectives, and adapt quickly when situations require a different approach. You follow through even against the toughest challenges.
- Team over Stars-You are a bridge builder, establishing processes and relationships with teams outside your own. You work to rally around common goals, find win-win solutions, compromise when necessary, and help others succeed.
- Growth over Comfort-You are driven by a desire to grow and actively seek opportunities to expand your comfort zone, skills, and confidence. You embrace new challenges with curiosity, accepting discomfort and failure as opportunities to learn.
- Fairness over Popularity-You approach decisions with a scientist’s mindset, challenging your assumptions and remaining objective. You consider long-term impact rather than relying on short-term gains, proactively seek others’ perspectives, and manage emotions in decision-making.
- Excellent collaboration skills — able to work across teams and make decisions that favor product/engineering standards and business outcomes.
