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Product Engineer, Backend (Go)

Own a business outcome, not a ticket queue—across Go microservices, Aurora PostgreSQL, data pipelines, and the tools we use to run the business.

Why this is hard

RTK Tickets is a fast-moving, data-driven brokerage at the intersection of live entertainment, technology, and trading. We provide liquidity in live event markets where prices, demand, and inventory can change by the minute.

Our systems make pricing and inventory decisions with real money. A bad decision shows up in P&L the same day. So does a good one.

We have grown every year since we started, and we are much bigger today than we were a few years ago. No investors set our pace, and we go after any market where better pricing and execution wins.

We have a team of engineers, each the directly responsible owner of a domain. You would work directly with the CTO, who built this platform and joined in 2022 as a senior engineer.

The job

You own a business outcome, not a ticket queue. We have a clear direction and a clear path to where we want to go, and inside it you have real autonomy. You decide how to get there, ship it, and measure what it did to the business.

The work spans Go microservices, Aurora PostgreSQL, data pipelines into our warehouse, and the Angular tools we use to run the business. You follow the problem across all of it, and you work with the people who run the business day to day, so you hear what broke while it is still broken.

What you would own

You get a sliver of the stack that is yours to run. Examples of what that looks like:

  • How we buy, price, and list on one marketplace, end to end, and whether it makes money.
  • The engine that decides what to buy and what to skip: why it skipped, and whether it was right.
  • The data that tells us, within hours, which decisions made money and which lost it.

In your first year, we expect three things:

  • A sliver of the stack that is yours to run, with outcomes you can point to.
  • Growth as an engineer, as a person, and as the link between product and the business. We are only as good as the team we have today, so everyone here is expected to keep getting better.
  • Solving hard business problems tied directly to the bottom line, which may mean running discovery, planning, execution, and verification yourself.

How we work

We use AI as much as we can, and there is no cap on tooling or resources. You are accountable for what ships. Our systems move real money, so correctness, idempotency, and edge cases are your job, however the code gets written.

We hire for judgment, not typing speed: knowing which problem is worth solving, and catching the subtle bug a fast code generator happily ships.

What to expect

We work hard, and you see the results in real time. Markets do not keep office hours, so expect long hours in busy stretches, especially around on-sale days and event dates. No investor sets our clock, and when you are spent, take a day or two off.

You will thrive here if you want ownership and results you can see. It may not be the right fit if:

  • You want a defined ticket queue and a written spec.
  • You want someone to review every decision before it ships.
  • You would rather optimize a function than ask whether it should exist.

What we are looking for

We look for evidence that you have owned an outcome. Degrees matter less, and two years or ten both work. Show us something you shipped, the business result, and what you chose not to build.

Must have

  • 2+ years building production software professionally, or equivalent proof of work.
  • You have owned a production system end to end and can explain the business result it produced.
  • You have shipped something that moved a business metric, and can say what you cut.
  • You have handled retries, duplicate or late data, and concurrency in production, where errors cost money.

Strong candidates also have

  • Experience on a startup or small team.
  • Product judgment: you ask what the business needs before you ask how to build it.
  • AWS experience running production services.
  • Go experience. It is preferred, not required, and a strong engineer in another language gets productive in Go quickly.
  • Angular experience.

Compensation and benefits

Base salary is $130,000 to $200,000. The range is wide on purpose: where you land depends on the impact you have shown, not on your years.

  • Performance-based bonus
  • Health and dental insurance
  • 401(k) with company match
  • Tickets to select live events
  • No cap on AI tooling and resources

Location

This is an in-person role in Boston’s Seaport District. Decisions here get made in hours, and we do our best work in the same room. Applicants must live in or be willing to relocate to the Greater Boston area.

How to apply

Apply through this posting and answer three things:

  • Tell us about something you shipped that moved a business metric. What was the metric, and what did you cut? A few sentences is enough.
  • Describe a production system you owned end to end: what it did, and the result it produced.
  • Confirm you can work on-site in Boston’s Seaport District.

Interview process

Our interview process begins with an initial conversation with our HR team, followed by introductory calls with members of our hiring team. The final stage is an on-site meeting at our Boston Seaport office to meet the team and discuss the role in more depth.