About this Staff Software Engineer - Core Platform role at StubHub
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.
