Engineering Manager

ABOUT VICTORY LIVE
Victory Live is a private equity backed technology company aimed at maximizing distribution and yield for live event ticket inventory. We provide an end-to-end software platform for the live ticketing industry, managing thousands of sports, theater, and live music event tickets on behalf of artists, promoters, teams, venues, and professional resellers. Victory Live’s comprehensive offerings include an established B2B marketplace, along with both a full-service and an automated SaaS platform to handle all elements of the ticket sales lifecycle, from ingestion to sales fulfillment.

THE POSITION
Victory Live is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a team of engineers working across our Ruby, Python, and .NET services. This isn't a pure people-manager role. You'll bring real technical depth, help set architectural direction, and be the person your team looks to when there's no clear answer. You'll also think ahead: understand where your domain needs to go, make the bets, and connect that strategy to your team's day-to-day work.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Lead and mentor your team, holding a bar for technical excellence, delivery, and stakeholder satisfaction across the engineers who report to you.
• Set technical direction. Guide architecture and technology decisions for your team's systems, working across Ruby, Python, and .NET as the work requires.
• Stay hands-on. Spend roughly 5–10% of your time in code reviews, architectural guidance, and hands-on debugging during critical incidents.
• Translate strategy into execution. Define where your domain needs to be in 12–24 months, turn that into team bets and priorities, and own that narrative with stakeholders.
• Partner cross-functionally. Align technical strategy with product, business, and other engineering teams, and turn high-level vision into actionable plans.
• Build the team. Hire, develop, and retain engineers, and create a culture where people do their best work and grow.
• Drive AI-native practices. Model and push adoption of Claude Code, Copilot, and agentic workflows as a standard part of how your team ships.
• Own delivery. Plan capacity, manage tradeoffs, and negotiate scope with stakeholders without compromising quality or team health.

REQUIREMENTS

• 8+ years of software engineering experience across production systems.
• 3+ years of engineering management experience, with a track record of shipping business-impactful work.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy and connect it to team execution, not just manage delivery.
• Strong technical depth in at least one of our core stacks (Ruby on Rails, Python/FastAPI, or C#/.NET), with the ability to speak credibly across the others.
• Proven ability to attract, retain, and develop engineering talent.
• Active, deliberate use of AI-powered development tools, with a track record of driving adoption on a team.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to build trust across engineering and non-engineering stakeholders.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience managing distributed teams across onshore and offshore locations.
• Background in ticketing, marketplaces, e-commerce, or other high-transaction consumer platforms.
• Experience leading a team through an acquisition, platform consolidation, or major system migration.

WHY VICTORY LIVE

• You'll build the infrastructure live events run on; millions of tickets, hundreds of venues, many of the largest teams and events in the world.
• A lean team where decisions move fast and your code reaches real fans, often the same week.
• Every release has stakes. Every improvement is felt.
• High expectations, low tolerance for politics, and a culture built on writing well and shipping with care.

OUR VALUES

We build the systems that power live event ticketing, and we hold a high bar for how we do it. Four principles run through everything:

• Quality of life. Sustainable processes over heroics. Nobody should be a single point of failure, and nobody should be afraid to take a vacation.
• Quality of code. Clarity over cleverness. If a teammate needs a long explanation to follow your code, it needs simplifying. Tests prove your work; they aren't optional.
• Protection of production. Every change is reviewed, tested, and observable. We build with monitoring in mind from day one so we find problems before our users do.
• Shared knowledge. We work across time zones, so we communicate in the open. Questions go in channels, not DMs, and one answer becomes shared knowledge.

ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES
We are an AI-native engineering team. Here is what that looks like in practice:

• AI-assisted engineering. Every engineer uses Claude, Claude Code, Copilot, and agentic tooling as a routine part of their workflow.
• Async-first. Most decisions happen in writing through Jira, Confluence, PR descriptions, design docs. We over-communicate on changes and under-communicate on noise.
• Ownership mindset. Engineers are responsible for what they write and no code reaches production without review. Reviewers are co-owners.
• Observability is part of "done." If the on-call engineer can't understand a system without reading source, more logging, metrics, and dashboards are needed.
• Preservation of quality of code and life. We write code that is clean, tested, and maintainable so it serves us well over time, and we build sustainable processes so no one burns out or becomes a single point of failure.
• Shared knowledge and continued education. We grow as a team by learning from each other through reviews, documentation, and collaboration.

OUR STACK & WAYS OF WORKING

• VL1 (our core platform), B2B marketplace, distribution integrations, partner-facing APIs
• Web & mobile clients, REST APIs, microservices
• Languages: Ruby, Python, Typescript, C-Sharp
• Frameworks and Technologies: Rails, Hanami, FastAPI, .NET, Postgres, DynamoDB, MSSQL Server, Docker, Terraform
• Cloud Providers: AWS, Azure
• Data: Snowflake, dbt, Dagster, AWS, Azure Data Factory, Sigma, Airflow
• AI tooling: Anthropic / Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, in-house agentic workflows
• Observability: Datadog, Grafana, Elastic/Kibana, OpsGenie
• Collaboration: Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Slack, Miro
• Async-first, agile cadences, distributed onshore + offshore teams

BENEFITS & PERKS

• Comprehensive medical coverage
• 100% employer-paid dental, vision, life, and disability insurance
• 401(k) with company match
• Paid parental leave
• Paid time off and company holidays
• Employee wellness and professional development opportunities

Victory Live is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, creed, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship status, marital status, disability, gender identity, gender expression, Veteran status, or another other characteristic protected by state, local or federal law.