Lead Platform Engineer

Company: GoTickets
Location: Chicago, IL — Primarily In-Office
Reports to: SVP of Engineering
Employment: Full-Time
Compensation: $175,000–$225,000 Base + Target Bonus
Visa Sponsorship: Not Available

GoTickets is a growing live-event ticket marketplace connecting fans with sports, concerts, theater, and comedy across the country. Our infrastructure supports the customer experience from browsing through checkout, alongside inventory, partner integrations, and the internal systems that run the business.

We're looking for a hands-on Lead Platform Engineer to own the performance, reliability, and security of that infrastructure. You'll work directly with the SVP of Engineering and our technical founder, influence architecture and investment decisions, and see the effect of your work on customers and the business.

You'll inherit a production platform with real traffic and meaningful engineering challenges. The opportunity is to make it faster, more reliable, easier to operate, and easier for engineering teams to build on.

You'll start as a senior individual contributor, with the opportunity to build and lead a team as the platform grows.

• Own infrastructure health across staging and production, including Kubernetes and AWS services.
• Establish performance baselines, service-level objectives, monitoring dashboards, and actionable alerts.
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response for production infrastructure issues.
• Quickly identify errors, troubleshoot outages, conduct root-cause analysis, and implement long-term solutions.
• Improve platform scalability to handle significant traffic spikes during high-demand live events.
• Own high availability and disaster recovery, including redundancy, failover, backups, and recovery procedures.
• Manage infrastructure upgrades, patching, vulnerability remediation, and cloud cost optimization.

• Design, operate, and improve our Amazon EKS/Kubernetes platform, including networking, ingress, node scaling, and Helm charts.
• Own CI/CD infrastructure using Jenkins, Argo CD, and automated deployment workflows.
• Maintain infrastructure as code using Terraform and Terraform Cloud.
• Build scalable, reliable infrastructure that supports engineering and data teams.
• Automate operational processes and improve deployment efficiency.
• Partner with application engineers on production releases, infrastructure changes, and database migration safety.

• Own infrastructure security controls across AWS and Kubernetes environments.
• Manage IAM, workload identity, secrets management, and least-privilege access.
• Operate Cloudflare for traffic management, security, and secure access to internal applications.
• Monitor and respond to credential misuse, unauthorized access, and infrastructure configuration drift.
• Maintain security boundaries between production, staging, development, and automation systems.
• Support secure access and operational controls for AI tools and integrations.

• Partner directly with the SVP of Engineering to establish infrastructure priorities and technical direction.
• Lead significant platform improvements and infrastructure migrations from design through production.
• Make architectural decisions balancing scalability, reliability, security, and cost.
• Collaborate with engineering teams and mentor developers on infrastructure best practices.
• Help establish and eventually grow the platform engineering team.

• Approximately 5–10+ years of relevant experience in Platform Engineering, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, or Cloud Infrastructure.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and Amazon EKS.
• Production experience writing and maintaining Terraform infrastructure.
• Experience with Cloudflare, cloud security, and infrastructure access management.
• Demonstrated experience managing on-call rotations, troubleshooting production outages, and conducting root-cause analysis.
• Experience supporting highly scalable, high-availability production platforms.
• Experience building or maintaining CI/CD pipelines and automated deployments.
• Strong knowledge of AWS IAM, networking, infrastructure security, and monitoring.
• Proven ability to independently own infrastructure projects and solve complex technical problems.
• Strong communication skills and interest in growing into broader technical leadership responsibilities.

• Cloud Infrastructure: AWS, Multi-Account AWS Environments
• Container Orchestration: Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, Karpenter, Helm
• Infrastructure as Code: Terraform, Terraform Cloud
• CI/CD: Jenkins, Argo CD
• Edge & Security: Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, AWS IAM, GuardDuty, Security Hub
• Monitoring & Observability: Datadog
• Databases & Data Infrastructure: Aurora MySQL, Redis, OpenSearch, Redshift, ClickHouse
• AI Infrastructure: Amazon Bedrock, MCP