Lead API Engineer
Who We Are: Vivid Seats is the fastest-growing online marketplace for sports, theatre, and concert tickets. We are dedicated to providing our customers with the best ticket buying experience in the industry. We offer the perks, culture, and opportunity of an entrepreneurial start-up, supported by the scale, stability, and resources of over a decade of profitable growth.
At Vivid Seats, you won't ever be a sub or sitting on the bench — we'll give you the opportunity to carry the rock or grab the mic starting day one.
If you enjoy continually looking for ways to make an impact on your team, organization, and industry, we’d like to hear from you.
Job Description:
Vivid Seats is looking for a technical lead to shape and drive the company’s API strategy. As a Lead API Engineer, you will help set the direction of the design and development of Vivid Seats evolving, scaling, high traffic marketplace through internal and external published APIs.
This is a hands-on position that will tackle some of our most difficult challenges scaling an ecommerce marketplace. You’ll work with business stakeholders to define and implement features that maximize value and efficiency across the organization. As the technical subject matter expert on your team, you’ll also be tasked with mentoring engineers, bringing new solutions to the table, and challenging the team to continuously improve.
Our marketplace continues to expand with our applications handling more requests each month. If you are an expert in architecting modern APIs and passionate about translating innovative ideas into quickly released code, this position is for you.
Responsibilities:
- Define, design, develop, and implement API strategy for Vivid Seats
- Implement and onboard services to an API Gateway
- Develop and test various policies for governance, management and runtime execution of APIs
- Onboard various clients to use the APIs
- Develop mock client apps to perform end-to-end testing
- Perform Integration, QA, and Performance tests
- Analyze and evaluate existing technologies
- Plan and lead architectural improvements to make the development, consumption, testing and deployment of APIs more efficient
- Identify development bottlenecks, improve automation, and leverage open source technology to deploy quality code, faster
- Mentor engineers, document and implement best practice coding standards, and proactively enhance our platform to create the best possible experience for our users
- Work closely with Product, QA, and Design teams to prototype creative solutions quickly
Desired Skills and Experience:
- 6+ years expertise developing Web based, Distributed and Multi-Tier architecture using Java or other major platforms.
- 2-3 years experience designing, building, and testing APIs for internal and external developers
- Expert knowledge of Spring, REST, APIs, Service Oriented Architecture, OAuth, Basic Authentication, and PCI
- Ability to translate complex technical concepts into high-level designs and act as a subject matter expert in software design, architecture, implementation, deployment, and support across our full platform
- Strong knowledge of modern front end technologies such as JavaScript and Single Page Application frameworks and their interactions with APIs
- Proficient in SQL, knowledge of NoSQL and real-time data pipelines
- Experience with Linux and Open Source Tools
What We Offer:
Vivid Seats offers competitive compensation levels, substantial individual and team-based bonus opportunities, aggressive promotion timelines, and a variety of workplace perks. Specifically, staff has access to discounted event tickets, frequent in-office catered meals, monthly happy hours, team outings, free in-building gym memberships, subsidized healthy meal and snack programs, and summer sports leagues. Standard benefits are also offered including medical/dental/vision/life insurance, paid maternity and paternity leave, 401(k) plan with employer match, flexible hours and paid time off, and transit plan discounts.
Vivid Seats is an equal opportunity employer. Vivid Seats prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type and affords equal employment opportunities to employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability or genetic information.