Staff Software Engineer - Core Platform

StubHub is on a mission to redefine the live event experience on a global scale. Whether someone is looking to attend their first event or their hundredth, we’re here to delight them all the way from the moment they start looking for a ticket until they step through the gate. The same goes for our sellers. From fans selling a single ticket to the promoters of a worldwide stadium tour, we want StubHub to be the safest, most convenient way to offer a ticket to the millions of fans who browse our platform around the world.
We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Core Platform - Streaming & Storage team. In this role, you will lead the architecture and delivery of foundational streaming, messaging, and storage platforms that power P0 workflows across StubHub.
The team provides core engineering products used broadly across the company, including message queues, DLQ and retry infrastructure, messaging control planes, and storage platforms such as key-value databases, distributed caches, blob storage, and search/indexing systems. These platforms enable teams to build reliable, scalable, and event-driven services.
Today these platforms process 10–30 billion events per day for roughly 100 service teams. The team is at the beginning of a major program to bring StubHub's streaming home to AWS — consolidating from Azure services (EventHub, ServiceBus) onto a modern, Kafka-compatible platform with schema enforcement, self-service SDKs, and direct streaming and querying of event data from S3.
As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be the technical owner across our Streaming and Nonrelational Storage domains: setting technical direction, driving the key architecture and vendor decisions, ensuring operational excellence for P0 infrastructure, and mentoring the engineers who build and run it.
Location: Onsite (3 days in office/2 days remote) – New York, NY, Santa Monica, CA, or Aliso Viejo, CA
What You'll Do:
Own the technical strategy and architecture for StubHub's streaming platform and NoSQL/storage offerings
Lead the migration of streaming from Azure to an AWS-native, Kafka-compatible platform — vendor selection and benchmarking, broker deployment, schema registry, and producer/consumer SDKs
Design and operate high-throughput infrastructure processing billions of events per day, with reliability and performance appropriate to its company-wide blast radius
Drive engineering excellence: architecture and design reviews, observability, operational readiness, and incident response for P0 systems
Partner with ~100 service teams on adoption — migration guides, tooling, sign-off processes, and developer experience
Ensure compliance and governance (SOX, GDPR/CCPA) are designed into the platform, including PII handling, retention, and data access controls
Mentor and grow a team of 3–5 engineers, raising the technical bar through design review and coaching
Shape the team's multi-year roadmap in partnership with engineering
What You've Done:
8+ years of software engineering experience, including several years acting as a technical lead for large-scale distributed systems
Deep expertise in event streaming and messaging — Kafka or Kafka-compatible brokers (e.g., MSK, Confluent, Redpanda, AutoMQ, WarpStream)
Proven experience operating production infrastructure at scale: high availability, incident response, performance tuning, and cost management
Experience with cloud data storage and NoSQL systems (object storage, key-value stores, distributed caches, search/indexing)
Track record of leading multi-quarter, cross-team platform migrations or programs end-to-end
Excellent communication skills — able to align leadership, partner teams, and engineers on technical direction
Bonus points: schema registry and compatibility tooling, lakehouse formats (Iceberg), CDC pipelines, .NET/C# and Python, Kubernetes/EKS, Terraform, OpenTelemetry
Experience mentoring junior engineers
What We Offer:
Accelerated Growth Environment: An environment designed for swift skill and knowledge enhancement, where you have the autonomy to lead experiments and tests on a massive scale.
Top Tier Compensation Package: Competitive base, equity, and upside that tracks with your impact.
Flexible Time Off: Embrace a healthy work-life balance with unlimited Flex Time Off, providing you the flexibility to manage your schedule and recharge as needed.
Comprehensive Benefits Package: Prioritize your well-being with a comprehensive benefits package, featuring 401k, and premium Health, Vision, and Dental Insurance options.
The anticipated gross base pay range is below for this role. Actual compensation will vary depending on factors such as a candidate’s qualifications, skills, experience, and competencies. Base annual salary is one component of StubHub’s total compensation and competitive benefits package, which includes equity, 401(k), paid time off, paid parental leave, and comprehensive health benefits.
Salary Range
$300,000—$350,000 USD
About Us
StubHub is the world’s leading marketplace to buy and sell tickets to any live event, anywhere. Through StubHub in North America and viagogo, our international platform, we service customers in 195 countries in 33 languages and 49 available currencies. With more than 300 million tickets available annually on our platform to events around the world -- from sports to music, comedy to dance, festivals to theater -- StubHub offers the safest, most convenient way to buy or sell tickets to the most memorable live experiences. Come join our team for a front-row seat to the action.
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We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity on our team. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected status.