Principal Software Engineer

Ticketmaster is the world’s largest ticket marketplace, dedicated to connecting people to live events. They are seeking a Principal Software Engineer to join their Platform Payments team, focusing on the maintenance and modernization of critical payment processing systems that handle millions of transactions monthly.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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 API design
• Experience with Linux/Unix environments
• Rust experience or genuine interest in learning it
• gRPC experience or familiarity with service decomposition from monolithic architectures
• Payment gateway integration experience (Chase Paymentech, Braintree, Adyen, or similar)
• PCI-DSS compliance knowledge and implementation experience
• Experience with platform migrations (e.g., Windows to Linux, MSVC to Clang)
• Bazel build system expertise
• Performance profiling experience
• Experience with shared memory, IPC frameworks, or low-level concurrency primitives
• Kafka or other event streaming platforms experience
• OpenSSL/cryptographic libraries hands-on experience
• Familiarity with AI-powered code review and static analysis tools
• Awareness of security considerations when using AI tools with legacy or under-documented systems