Freelance Full Stack Python Developer Jobs in Chicago, IL

The Opportunity:     

As a Lead Full Stack Software Engineer on the Distribution team, you'll set the technical direction for the systems powering our partnership platforms - a critical revenue channel for the business. You'll make highly visible enhancements to our platform by maintaining and also building new features across our stack. Our teams work with a variety of applications that enable us to sell tickets, manage inventory, support our partnerships, and provide a great customer experience from the website to the box office. Following development best practices, you'll be responsible for developing solutions that scale to the needs of our customers and partners.  

How your role contributes to the success of Vivid Seats:

• Lead the design, technical direction, and long-term modernization of the Distribution platform - the services, jobs, and integrations that sync inventory, pricing, and orders with our partners, and the patterns the team will build on for years.
• Take deep ownership of our existing Distribution systems: build a thorough understanding of how they work today, why they were built that way, and where they're heading.
• Set the bar for development, quality and operational excellence, and participate in the team's on-call rotation  
• Grow other engineers through pairing, code reviews, tech talks, and influence who joins the team through interviews and onboarding.

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, how Distribution fits into Vivid Seats' business, and who our key partners are.
• Acclimate to team and company norms, business objectives, and Vivid Seats values.
• Build a working map of the Distribution stack - the services, jobs, data stores, and partner integrations the team owns, including legacy systems.
• Deploy and make changes to our production systems, and start building relationships with peers across engineering, product, partner ops, and business.

 90 Days In

• Own significant pieces of the Distribution architecture and drive improvements to our processes, methods, and technologies in support of business goals, making pragmatic trade-offs between modernization and short-term delivery.
• Become the go-to person for how our Distribution systems behave - their history, edge cases, and the safe, confident ways to change them.
• Lead team planning, estimations, and design sessions, and represent Distribution's technical position in broader engineering forums.
• Establish a mindset of continuous experimentation on the team and measurably improve delivery efficiency across both modern and long-standing parts of the stack.
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders to decompose internal and partner objectives into iterative, shippable plans.
• Produce and deliver clean, quality code on critical paths, and raise the bar on code review and design review across the team.

180 Days In

• Use application observability to identify areas for improvement before they become problems for our partners, and coach the team to do the same.
• Be the technical owner for all applications in Distribution's scope, with deep self-sufficiency and a clear point of view on where each is headed.
• Drive a multi-quarter technical roadmap for Distribution - covering both new capabilities and the legacy systems we need to evolve, replace, or retire - that ladders up to company and department goals.
• Identify systemic areas of opportunity in the platform and communicate the impact to stakeholders and leadership.
• Actively grow the engineers on your team - own development plans alongside their managers, and visibly raise the technical ceiling of the group, especially in their ability to work confidently across the full Distribution stack.

What You'll Bring:

• 8+ years of professional experience building and supporting production web applications, including time spent leading technical initiatives that span multiple engineers or teams.
• Demonstrated experience working in and improving codebases with significant history and meaningful business impact - with genuine enthusiasm for that kind of work. You see legacy code as a puzzle to learn and an opportunity to leave better than you found it.
• Deep experience with modern front-end technologies such as TypeScript, Next.js, and React, and how they interact with APIs at scale.
• Strong experience designing, building, and operating web-based, distributed, and multi-tier architectures using Java/Spring or other major tech stacks (Python, Node, Scala, etc.).
• A track record of designing, building, and evolving web services, APIs, and partner-facing integrations that other teams or external systems depend on.
• Comfort with the operational realities of distributed systems: batch and event-driven jobs, retry and idempotency, consistency between systems of record, and partner SLAs.
• Experience mentoring and growing senior engineers, coaching them through unfamiliar parts of a codebase and helping build skill and confidence.
• Strong written and interpersonal communication skills for documentation, sharing best practices, and discussing engineering topics with non-engineering partners.
• Preferred knowledge of Service Oriented Architecture, PCI, and SQL.
• Experience with high-volume, latency-sensitive e-commerce, marketplace, or distribution systems is a strong plus.
• A proactive mindset toward embracing, experimenting, and integrating AI tools to drive efficiency, elevating your work and your team's work, and contribute to a culture of innovation.

Vivid Seats Pay Transparency Disclaimer: Full time offers from Vivid Seats include annual bonus incentives 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. The typical starting salary within the full salary range for this position can range. Factors which may affect starting salary include geographic market, relevant skills/experience, education, and other qualifications.

Location: Chicago, IL 

We believe in a hybrid 3 days/week in-office 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.

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