Software Engineer

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's top places to work in 2025, 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.

We believe in harnessing emerging technology to power performance and unlock creativity. As part of our culture of innovation, we actively embrace the use of AI tools to enhance decision-making, improve workflows, and produce better outcomes for our customers.

The Opportunity:    

As a Software Engineer (Orders), you will build and support systems responsible for the acquisition of multi-million dollar monthly revenue. You will work on the latest technology stack and make decisions which will directly impact the final product. Following software development best practices, you'll be responsible for developing solutions that scale to the needs of our customers.   

How your role contributes to the success of Vivid Seats:     

• Help lead direction of the technology systems powering our ticket marketplace offerings.
• Develop experiments and innovative solutions that give Vivid Seats a competitive advantage, encourage team members, and champion technology improvements for your team.
• Work cross-functionally with other development teams and business stakeholders to deliver impact iteratively.
• Tackle some of the most difficult challenges scaling an e-commerce marketplace by developing creative algorithms and features that maximize value and efficiency across the organization.
• Collaborate to develop and maintain best practices across the software development lifecycle.
• Mentor other engineers through pairing, code reviews, and tech talks.  

How your role expectations will progress as a Software 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 to team and company norms, business objectives, and Vivid Seats values.
• Develop basic understanding of applications, tech stack, and development process.
• Deploy and make changes to our production systems.   

90 days in    

• Contribute to our processes, methods, or technologies to support overall business goals and drive team efficiencies.
• Contribute to team planning, estimations, and design sessions.
• Apply a solid understanding of our business goals and our system architecture to your everyday decision making.
• Leverage a mindset of continuous experimentation to help with team efficiency.
• Work with cross-functional stakeholders to decompose and iteratively deliver business objectives.
• Produce and deliver clean, quality code that drives team and company tech goals forward.   

180 days in    

• Leverage application observability tools to know about problems before our users.
• Have self-sufficiency in all applications touched by the team.
• Proactively engage in continuous learning in order to advance skill sets necessary for team goals.
• Identify areas of opportunity within our systems, come up with a plan to improve them, ship them, and share results and impact.
• Own a career growth plan developed in partnership with your manager, and work towards it.   

What You'll Bring:     

•  4+ years of professional software engineering experience, preferably in backend or distributed systems. 
• Strong Java experience; Spring Boot experience is highly preferred.  
• Experience building REST APIs, event-driven services, or asynchronous consumers/producers.  
• Familiarity with relational databases and data-access patterns; MyBatis or similar experience is a plus. 
• Experience with automated testing, integration testing, CI/CD, and production debugging.  
• Comfort working with payment, ordering, accounting, tax, fraud, or customer-service systems. 
• Ability to reason about correctness, idempotency, failure handling, retries, reconciliation, and auditability in transaction-heavy systems.  
• Strong written and interpersonal communication skills to document and share team best practices across the department.
• Exposure to design systems and a/b testing.
• A proactive mindset toward embracing, experimenting, and integrating AI tools to drive efficiency, elevate your work, and contribute to a culture of innovation.  

Vivid Seats Pay Transparency Disclaimer: Full time offers from Vivid Seats include annual bonus incentives; FLEX PTO; mental health days; medical, dental, and vision insurance; 401K matching; monthly credits and discounts for attending live events; and a variety of additional workplace perks. The typical starting salary within the full salary range for this position can range. Factors which may affect starting salary include geographic market, relevant skills/experience, education, and other qualifications. 

Base Salary Range: $100,000-$125,000 

https://corporate.vividseats.com/careers/

Location: Chicago, IL   

We believe in a hybrid working model which provides employees the flexibility to take advantage of in-person and remote collaboration. Check out our brand new HQ office, bursting with the energy of live events fandom and the vibrancy of Chicago's rising tech scene.  

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.