Platform Engineering Manager

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 the manager of platform/development operations, you will lead a team of engineers responsible for cloud infrastructure, monitoring, and devops who are responsible for the day-to-day support of Vivid Seats infrastructure and developer tooling. This role is responsible for a variety of cloud platforms and technologies that will impact all Vivid Seats delivery teams as well as the operations of many of the mission-critical operations that support our marketplace operations. We are looking for a leader who can be hands on if needed and has experience building and leading highly technical and operations focused teams.

In addition to bringing DevOps best practices, you will develop a collaborative, cross-disciplinary and high-performing team while overseeing and improving organizational design, structure, priorities, management processes and reporting information systems. They will be responsible for hiring and promoting talent, while building productive, value-added partnerships with vendors. You will also be integral in building an engaged Vivid Seats corporate culture. How results are achieved will be as important as what is achieved.

How your role contributes to the success of Vivid Seats:

• Develop, coach, and retain engineers in a high-performing engineering team, capable of operating in and responding to our internal and external stakeholder needs.
• Participate in hiring initiatives to attract, screen, and hire new engineering talent.
• Lead complex initiatives and act as a technical subject matter expert in infrastructure design, architecture, implementation, deployment, and support for all platform operations.
• Design, build, and maintain a stable and efficient infrastructure to optimize service delivery across production, QA, and development environments throughout the development lifecycle.
• Design, build, and maintain a stable and efficient infrastructure to optimize service delivery across production, QA, and development environments throughout the development lifecycle.
• Utilize a consistent DevOps approach to improve all phases of the development and release process and ensure end-to-end quality across functions.
• Lead a team to monitor, troubleshoot, maintain, and continuously improve building, packaging, and deployment processes.
• Identify and deliver infrastructure and platform projects aimed at improving uptime, security, availability, capacity, cost-effectiveness, and performance
• Promote development best practices such as BDD, TDD, and pair programming in a fast-paced Agile environment
• Ensure that project/department milestones/goals are met and manages to approved budgets.
• Help us in our goal of building the Vivid Seats brand as a technology leader throughout the United States and Canada.
  

How your role expectations will progress as a Job Title in the first 30, 90, and 180 days:

30 days in

• Acclimate to Vivid Seats values and organizational goals to understand how your department drives initiatives forward.

• Learn how ticket marketplaces operate and how youll contribute to providing great experiences for our customers.
• Understand your teams contributions and the needs of stakeholders that rely on your deliverables to bring business objectives to life.
• Set weekly touch points with direct reports to understand their role, motivations, and needs, building trust and leading with empathy.
• Develop basic understanding of applications, tech stack, and development.
• Review and understand the project roadmap and operations processes currently in place for the team.?
• Complete 1-1 meetings with Infrastructure and Software managers to understand their roles, priorities, and needs, building trust and a spirit of comradery.
  

90 days in

• Empower and coach team members to achieve personal and functional goals that correlate to department objectives.
• Develop and lead initiatives for your team that enhance process, drive innovation, and build on Vivid Seats values.
• Establish improved processes for operationalizing platform management to reduce downtime, improve security, and effectively manage cost.
• Coordinate with the recruiting team to build a pipeline of qualified candidates to help fill out your team.
• Start to build out a roadmap for functionality that supports our strategic goals over the coming year.
  

180 days in

• Monitor and evolve team deliverables, individual goals, and overall performance to ensure alignment with broader initiatives of your department and the organization while coaching your team to grow skill sets.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to accurately prioritize and refine processes that yield best practices.
• Meaningfully contribute to department roadmap exercises that balance current needs with future strategic initiatives.
• Onboard more engineers to your team and build career development plans for them.
• Own business-facing communications regarding your teams progress and accountability for your teams engineering KPIs.
• Lead the way for the platform team by developing and executing on a thoughtful and flexible infrastructure roadmap.
  

What Youll Bring:

• Desire to learn, grow, experiment, motivate, and bring positive energy to motivate a team to get their best
• Proven experience successfully leading and mentoring a team of engineers with a strong preference on operations and DevOps
• Multiple years of experience in an AWS environment utilizing VPC, ECS, EC2, Kubernetes/EKS, S3, CloudFront, WAF
• 5+ years of experience in SDLC
• Proficiency in monitoring, alerting, and observability tools such as Grafana, DataDog, or the ELK stack
• Experience in a fast-paced, agile environment with strong attention to CI/CD
• Prior experience designing and implementing infrastructure automation and relevant tools (e.g. Chef, Ansible, CloudFormation, Terraform)
• Prior experience with PCI, ISO, SOX, or other compliance processes is a plus
• Demonstrate strong problem analysis problem resolution and decision-making and a growth mindset
  

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; remote work and snack allowances; 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 Chicagos 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.