Location: Chicago, Toronto, Remote
Who we are: 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 Chicago's top 10 places to work in 2021, 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.
The Opportunity: 
Our Data Engineering team is looking for a Lead Engineer to help modernize and optimize our overall data infrastructure to meet and anticipate the growing data needs that support our business growth. Our software and business teams depend on the data team to deliver robust, performant, and secure data products and solutions to enable every aspect of our business. As this critical area of our infrastructure grows, we are looking to expand our current offerings into more robust data products that can empower our applications and operations.
As the Lead Data Engineer you'll make highly visible enhancements to our platform by maintaining and building new features, as well as integrating several of our internal systems into cohesive platforms. You'll maximize your impact within the organization by providing mentorship, driving and improving our engineering processes, and architecting and deploying new services and systems. You'll work in Python, SQL, Snowflake, and AWS native services to support our business and technology teams, help onboard new data services and use cases, and build tooling.
Our Engineering department is made up of cross functional Agile development teams that deploy to AWS. You'll tackle some of the most difficult challenges scaling an ecommerce marketplace by developing creative and intuitive features that maximize value and efficiency across the organization.
You'll partner with a team of Data Engineers, Engineering Managers, Product Owners, Business Analysts, and Developers to deliver and manage exceptional data systems, showcasing your work at the end of each 2-week sprint cycle. Our teams will lean on your expertise for best practices in design patterns, query quality, testing, and innovation to keep our commitment of always putting our customers first.
How your role contributes to the success of Vivid Seats:

• You'll partner with engineering teams to create data models and assist in designing our transactional and analytical data stores.
• Design and build data systems and automated processes for our underlying cloud infrastructure and deployment pipelines.
• Mature operational stability of the data platform through best practices, automation and monitoring.
• Remain up to date on new and emerging technologies, planning accordingly to incorporate valuable concepts to enhance our data schema and capabilities.
• You will help mentor your team, ensuring that they are unblocked and productive while also being challenged to grow.
• You will be engaged in the software delivery process, helping to tune it to be effective and support the team.
• You'll give thoughtful code reviews to your peers.
• You'll coordinate with engineering leadership, business partners, and product teams to help set expectations around delivery timelines and solve technical challenges.

How your role expectations will progress as a Lead Data Engineer in the first 30, 90, and 180 days:
30 days in

• Complete new hire orientation, gaining the resources you need to be successful.
• Learn how ticket marketplaces operate and how you'll contribute to providing great experiences for our customers.
• Acclimate team and company norms, business objectives, and Vivid Seats values.
• Develop basic understanding of applications, tech stack, and development process.
• Pair with other senior data engineers on projects currently in place to improve our data operations and understand projects in flight.

90 days in

• Enhance our approaches, methods, or technologies to mitigate risks and improve efficiency.
• Build, maintain, and leverage internal and external relationships to achieve progress and advance objectives.
• Apply technical learning that aligns with the product and technology roadmap to overall department and organizational goals that drive company initiatives forward.
• Contribute to team planning, estimations and infrastructure design sessions.
• Deliver clear code and/or queries and thoughtful, insightful review of peer materials that helps level up our capabilities and our team.
• Understand the core challenges we face as a data organization and propose solutions or technologies based on your experience.

180 days in

• Design and implement process improvements that positively impact the team.
• Mentor others, playing an active role in elevating the skill sets of those you work with.
• Architect and take ownership of new components of our data platform, working with the leadership team, business partners, and product teams to come up with technical solutions to our key business needs.
• Guide the team's work so that it fits into the larger team and engineering group objectives.
• Improve efficiency in core systems and applications managed by the team and contribute to engineering group objectives.

What You'll Bring:

• Positive energy, a desire to contribute and mentor others, and a love for collaboration.
• A drive to identify and solve problems independently.
• A drive to deeply understand stakeholders and build solutions that meet their needs.
• A pragmatic view of technology and understanding of what tools are right for the job, not just fun to use.
• Willingness to challenge the status quo and bring innovative ideas to the organization.
• Expert knowledge of cloud-based relational databases and approaches towards performance optimization.
• Experience in either modeling transaction or data warehousing with an interest in learning both methodologies.
• Experience managing ETL pipelines with tools like Airflow and scripting using Java, Python or Bash.
• A cool playlist of bands or favorite performers you're excited to see live in the future so we can get to know you and help get you tickets.

Our Commitment:

We are an equal opportunity employer that values the critical importance of a diverse workforce and sense of belonging. Many of our roles have flexible requirements and we encourage you to apply regardless of whether you meet every qualification.

Vivid Seats provides competitive compensation; bonus incentives and equity for all employees; FLEX PTO; mental health days; medical, dental, and vision insurance; 401K matching; monthly credits and discounts for attending live events; remote work and snack allowances; and a variety of additional workplace perks.