Staff Software Engineer - Core Platform

StubHub•New York, NY

3h•$300,000 - $350,000•Hybrid

About The Position

StubHub is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join their Core Platform - Streaming & Storage team. This role will lead the architecture and delivery of foundational streaming, messaging, and storage platforms that power critical workflows across StubHub. The team provides core engineering products including message queues, DLQ and retry infrastructure, messaging control planes, and various storage platforms. Currently, these platforms handle 10-30 billion events daily for approximately 100 service teams. A major initiative is underway to migrate StubHub's streaming capabilities to AWS, consolidating from Azure services onto a Kafka-compatible platform with enhanced features like schema enforcement and direct data querying from S3. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be the technical owner for Streaming and Nonrelational Storage domains, responsible for setting technical direction, making key architecture and vendor decisions, ensuring operational excellence for critical infrastructure, and mentoring engineers.

Requirements

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
Experience mentoring junior engineers

Nice To Haves

schema registry and compatibility tooling
lakehouse formats (Iceberg)
CDC pipelines
.NET/C# and Python
Kubernetes/EKS
Terraform
OpenTelemetry

Responsibilities

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