Lead Web 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 2023 , 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:

As a Lead Web 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 one cohesive platform. You’ll provide mentorship to engineers in and out of your team, drive and improve our development process, and architect and deploy new services and systems that scale. You are comfortable learning and working with a variety of languages and tools to support technical and strategic outcomes. You are capable of identifying the source of performance bottlenecks and helping to mitigate them, keeping the application running fast and our customers happy.

Our Engineering department is made up of cross functional Agile development teams that work on the latest front end technology stack and make decisions which will directly impact the final product. 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 Product Owners, Quality Engineers, User Experience Designers and Developers to deliver exceptional software. Our teams will lean on your expertise for best practices in design patterns, code quality, testing, and innovation to keep our commitment of always putting our customers first.

How your role contributes to the success of Vivid Seats:

• Contribute to the design and development of our evolving in-house marketing platform.
• Directly impacts the efficiency of the marketing team while creating a blueprint for future projects in the company.
• Mentor engineers on your immediate team and across the engineering department, ensuring that they are unblocked and productive while also being challenged and supported to grow.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and UX leadership to identify, solution and implement improvements to delivery, quality, stability, and scalability initiatives.
• Deliver high-quality code and supportive documentation that sets an example for the rest of the team.
• Provide thoughtful code reviews to your peers that not only increases quality but teaches engineers best practices they can apply in the future.

How your role expectations will progress as a Lead 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.
• Become familiar with software platforms and delivery methodologies on your team.

90 days in:

• Enhance our approaches, methods, or technologies to mitigate risks and improve efficiencies.
• Thoroughly understand the context of current architecture and any technical pain points to begin formulating architectural solutions.
• Build, maintain, and leverage internal and external relationships to achieve progress and advance objectives.
• Deliver clean code and thoughtful, insightful code reviews that help level up our product and your team.
• Mentor engineers on your direct team.

180 days in:

• Design and implement process improvements that positively impact the team and broader engineering department.
• Mentor others within the department, playing an active role in elevating the skill sets of those you work with.
• Architect and take ownership of new components of our platform, working with the leadership team and product to come up with technical solutions to our key business needs.
• Apply methods to execute individual tasks that positively impacts the team.
• Produce and deliver clean, correct code that drives team and company tech goals forward.

What You’ll Bring:

• Positive energy, a desire to contribute to the growth and development of others, and a love for collaboration.
• A drive to identify and solve problems.
• The ability to deeply understand stakeholders and users 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.
• Extensive experience as a software engineer, ideally with at least some leadership experience mixed in.
• A solid grasp of OO concepts, service-oriented architecture, and how to build highly available and fault-tolerant systems.
• A proven career building applications and services in React.
• Experience in designing, building, and testing of modern web solutions as part of an agile or cross functional team.
• Strong knowledge of front-end web languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript).
• Exposure to server-side web technologies (Node, Java).
• Experience with JavaScript testing frameworks (Jest, RTL, etc.).
• Experience with Next.js is a plus.
• Strong written and interpersonal communication skills to document and share team best practices across the department.

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, and a variety of additional workplace perks.

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.