Principal Software Engineer

Job Summary:

Location: Remote North Calorina, remote Miami, Remote Florida

Division: Ticketmaster, Payments

Line manager: VP Marketplace Engineering

Contract terms: Permanent, full time

THE TEAM

We're seeking an experienced C++ engineer to join our Platform Payments team, working on Ticketmaster's mission-critical payment processing systems. These systems process millions of transactions monthly across multiple payment methods and 20+ gateway providers, powering real-time payments for culture-defining live events at massive global scale.

THE JOB

You'll work across a mature C/C++ codebase spanning three decades — from pre-standard patterns in our core authorization gateway to C++17 in our Bazel monorepo. The immediate work is maintenance and strategic modernization of these systems, but this role is explicitly designed to grow: from legacy renovation into systems design, gRPC service architecture, and new technology adoption including Rust. If you're energized by the challenge of understanding why a system was built the way it was before deciding what it should become, this is the role.

This is not a maintenance job with a maintenance ceiling. You'll work on systems that power how fans pay for live events worldwide — at a scale where a misconfiguration can cause thousands of payment failures during a major onsale. The intellectual challenge is real: strategic modernization of systems spanning three decades of C++, with a clear trajectory into new technology.

There is tremendous green-field work ahead: decomposing legacy IPC into gRPC services, strengthening real-time fraud defenses during peak onsales, optimizing seamless global checkout, integrating new payment methods, and expanding embedded finance that shapes not just ticket purchases but the full in-venue experience. A strong engineer in this role will meaningfully shape the direction of these critical systems.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

• Maintain and strategically modernize high-throughput payment processing systems handling real financial transactions in real time

• Drive platform migration work, including migrating a core Windows C++ authorization gateway to Linux via Clang and Bazel

• Develop robust payment integrations with third-party gateways (Chase Paymentech, Barclays, HSBC, AMEX, Adyen, Braintree, Klarna, Shift4, and others)

• Decompose legacy IPC frameworks into gRPC services, enabling payment components to be reused across the broader payments ecosystem — this is the bridge from maintenance into systems design

• Implement security-critical features involving encryption, PCI compliance, and sensitive payment data handling

• Optimize performance of transaction processing pipelines where latency directly affects whether a customer completes a purchase

• Incrementally steer legacy codebases toward modern C++ practices (RAII, ownership semantics, safe string handling) without breaking the payment flows that depend on them

• Design and implement comprehensive testing including unit tests, integration tests, and fuzz testing for security-critical components

• Debug and resolve production issues in systems with complex interdependencies and real operational takes

• Collaborate with payment operations teams to onboard new payment methods and gateway providers

• Ensure compliance with PCI-DSS and other financial industry standards

• Participate in on-call rotation for production payment system support

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW (or TECHNICAL SKILLS)

• 7+ years of professional C++ development experience in production environments

• Modern C++ fluency

• Strong understanding of systems programming, including memory management, concurrency, and performance optimization

• Ability to reason about undefined behavior, and its practical consequences across platforms

• Systematic debugging methodology

• Toolchain understanding and cross-compilation concerns

• Proficiency with build systems — Bazel experience highly valued;

• Experience working with legacy codebases older than 10 years — ability to understand, respect, and incrementally modernize existing systems

• Experience with or strong interest in payment processing or financial transaction systems

• Deep knowledge of security best practices

• Proficiency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude, Codex) with mature judgment — uses AI as an accelerator that requires human verification, especially in codebases with undefined behavior where AI-generated code can appear correct and still be wrong

• Understanding of HTTP/HTTPS protocols and RESTful