As a Staff Software Engineer, lead the design of ticketing systems across web, mobile, and backend services, focusing on performance and scalability while mentoring engineering teams.
Are you ready to architect end-to-end systems that power millions of fan moments across web, mobile and backend services?
Join Playon as a Staff Software Engineer on our Ticketing team and lead the evolution of our platform that spans digital ticket purchase, redemption, point-of-sale, and event-management experiences in the high-school and youth sports space.
You’ll drive system-level thinking across web and mobile apps (React/React Native), backend microservices (Java Spring Boot), and orchestration/infrastructure (AWS, Kafka, Postgres, Snowflake), owning the vision and delivery of critical flows that scale and perform when it matters most.
In this role you’ll partner with staff and senior engineers across our Shared Services and Fintech teams, define the roadmap for ticketing technology, lead proofs-of-concept for high-impact initiatives, and mentor engineering teams across full-stack domains. You’ll own complex integrations (e.g., payments, third-party hardware, reserved seating), solve performance bottlenecks under peak loads, and shape the technical direction of our ticketing services within the broader PlayOn ecosystem.
The outcomes you’ll deliver
· End-to-end platform impact: Lead the design and delivery of cross-surface systems (backend services, web apps, mobile apps) for ticket purchase, event creation, redemption and reporting, ensuring low-latency, high-throughput and high-availability for peak events.
· Business growth & reliability: Improve key metrics such as ticket conversion rate, purchase latency, retention, customer NPS for ticketing, and event success, while reducing error budgets and incidents.
· Strategic technical maturity: Define and drive the roadmap for ticketing systems — modernizing our stack (React/React Native, Java Spring Boot APIs, AWS), enhancing our existing products, and integrating new verticals (youth sports tournaments).
· Cross-team leverage & standardization: Build scalable, reusable solutions that influence architecture and technical standards beyond the ticketing team.
In this role, you can expect to
- Drive architectural and design decisions for ticketing event management, ticket checkout (digital presale and POS), reserved-seating systems, redemption flows and concessions.
- Collaborate with peer Staff Engineers in Shared Services and Fintech, as well as engineering managers and product leaders, to co-define priorities, surface trade-offs, and run proofs-of-concept for new directions.
- Lead major initiatives such as: migrating microservices from ECS and Lambda to EKS; optimizing performance for high-volume ticket transactions; resolving data-model alignment between ticketing and other domains; improving consistency and maintainability of frontend and backend stacks.
- Drive observability, automated governance and cross-surface reliability (web/mobile/backend) under load.
- Mentor senior engineers and contractors, lead design review forums, own major RFCs, refine engineering process (CI/CD, load testing, monitoring).
- Work with external vendors and partners (payment providers, reserved-seating / scanning hardware, POS integrations), evaluate technical risk, and drive vendor-agnostic solutions that support our scale and flexibility goals.
To thrive in this role, you have
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience (or equivalent depth) across backend, web and/or mobile systems.
- Proven experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems, especially in e-commerce, ticketing, or event-driven domains.
- Expert knowledge of Java; familiarity with Go, TypeScript/React/React Native; databases (PostgreSQL), stream/event systems (Kafka); data-warehousing (Snowflake) and modern orchestration (AWS EKS/ECS, SQS/SNS).
- Strong system-level thinking — able to balance delivery of features with long-term platform health, performance, scalability and maintainability.
- Excellent collaboration skills — able to work across teams and make decisions that favor product/engineering standards and business outcomes.
- Passion for mentoring, raising engineering standards, and helping teams grow.
- Experience integrating with Stripe or similar payment platforms preferred.
How You Play
- Ownership over Participation- You take responsibility for achieving holistic outcomes, prioritize key objectives, and adapt quickly when situations require a different approach. You follow through even against the toughest challenges.
- Team over Stars- You are a bridge builder, establishing processes and relationships with teams outside your own. You work to rally around common goals, find win-win solutions, compromise when necessary, and help others succeed.
- Growth over Comfort- You are driven by a desire to grow and actively seek opportunities to expand your comfort zone, skills, and confidence. You embrace new challenges with curiosity, accepting discomfort and failure as opportunities to learn.
- Fairness over Popularity- You approach decisions with a scientist’s mindset, challenging your assumptions and remaining objective. You consider long-term impact rather than relying on short-term gains, proactively seek others’ perspectives, and manage emotions in decision-making.
Company Overview
PlayOn is a dynamic growth-stage company dedicated to championing the spirit of play in the high school space. Backed by KKR, our family of brands—including GoFan, NFHS Network, and MaxPreps—empowers schools with innovative solutions and exceptional service. Our fan engagement platform is the only one that offers event ticketing, streaming, fundraising, concessions, merchandise sales, and website management in one place. We save administrators time so they can focus on what truly matters: supporting the students, staff, and fans who bring their programs to life.
Trusted by thousands of schools across the country, we're here to help create more instant replays, hold-your-breath moments, last-minute comebacks, and games you want to watch over and over again.
When being there means everything, we make sure you never miss a moment.
Why you’ll love working at PlayOn
Product, potential, and people. We’re a leader in the high school event space, constantly evolving our product to meet the needs of administrators. We focus on solving real challenges, learning quickly, and creating impactful solutions.
This is a growth-stage company, meaning your contributions have real impact. You’ll have opportunities to grow your skills, tackle meaningful problems, and make a difference in the lives of schools and the students and fans they serve.
Our culture is built on accountability, collaboration, growth, and fairness. We don’t just show up—we show up for each other. Everyone wears the same jersey, and we play hard, make the extra pass, and cheer one another on. Losses teach us, challenges motivate us, and persistence drives us forward. We value integrity over shortcuts, choosing to do what’s right even when it’s hard. Together, we strive to be better every day—because we know that’s how we win as a team.
The Benefits We Offer
Multiple medical insurance plans to choose from
Dental, vision life and disability insurance
Employee Emergency Fund
Company equity (stock options)
Open PTO policy
401K plan with company match
Hybrid/flexible work environment
Note: Must be a full-time employee to participate in the company’s employee health benefit plan. Part-time employees and interns are not eligible to participate.
Top Skills
AWS
Java
Kafka
Postgres
React
React Native
Snowflake
Spring Boot
Typescript
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