Technical Lead

Technical Lead (Universe)

We're looking for a Technical Lead to join Moshtix in Auckland and lead our engineering work on Universe, Ticketmaster's global self-serve ticketing platform headquartered in Toronto. You'll be a permanent member of the Moshtix engineering team, with a dedicated focus on building alongside the Universe engineering and product teams.

It's a hands-on leadership role at the intersection of two platforms, two teams and two hemispheres. You'll write and review code, shape architecture, grow engineers and set the bar for how a modern engineering team works with AI. You'll also connect the two businesses so that what each does best strengthens the other.

As a Technical Lead, you're accountable for delivering high-quality, maintainable and performant software, and for leading the people who build it. You'll work under general direction with plenty of autonomy, taking initiative, removing roadblocks and making sound technical decisions in a distributed environment where much of the conversation is asynchronous.

Our clients rely on both platforms to stay stable and fast when demand is spiky and unpredictable, whether that's a festival on-sale at 8am or a sold-out exhibition release. You'll architect solutions, ship frequently through continuous deployment and help make sure we build the right software in the right way.

Auckland and Toronto are 16 to 18 hours apart depending on daylight saving, so Toronto's working day ends around when Auckland's begins. Making that gap work is a core requirement of this role, not an occasional extra.

• You will regularly be required to work and attend meetings outside standard Auckland business hours. This is typically early mornings to overlap with Toronto's afternoon, and at times evenings for planning, incidents or key releases.
• Flexibility goes both ways. When the role needs you early or late, we'll work with you to balance that within your working week, for example by adjusting your start or finish time around those sessions.
• Occasional international travel, including to Toronto, may be required.

AI has changed how software is built, and how we build it. We use AI tools and automation throughout our continuous discovery and delivery cycle, not only to write code. AI speeds up the work, and people stay accountable for it.

As a Technical Lead, you'll help shape how your team adopts these tools: fluent and fast, but accountable. You own the result, whoever or whatever wrote the first draft.

Universe is moving from legacy Ruby on Rails to contract-driven, service-oriented architecture built on TypeScript, Node.js, Next.js and Go, using Kafka, Postgres, MongoDB, gRPC, GraphQL and Kubernetes, with strong observability tooling.

Moshtix combines a long-running ASP.NET C# core with serverless Node.js/TypeScript services and React front ends on our GraphQL API, plus event-driven Lambda services on EventBridge. We use MSSQL, DynamoDB, S3, Redis and Elasticsearch, with Fastly at the edge, and deploy to AWS with GitHub Actions and AWS CDK.

Our job descriptions change as our business needs and priorities change, and your role may include additional duties, projects and team support as needed.

A typical week will include a mix of the following:

• Leading the technical direction and delivery of a cross-functional team focused on Universe, owning outcomes from discovery and design through build, release and support.
• Architecting and building new products and features, and pragmatically maintaining and modernising legacy and core systems.
• Staying hands-on by writing, reviewing and pair-programming on production code, and setting the standard for quality, testing, observability and performance.
• Driving contract-driven, well-documented service and API design (e.g. protobuf/gRPC, GraphQL) so teams in different time zones can build in parallel with confidence.
• Spotting where capabilities from one platform can strengthen the other, for example timed-entry capacity management and high-demand general admission on-sales, and making sound build, buy and reuse decisions.

• Collaborating and aligning with Universe engineering and product leaders locally and in Toronto, building strong, trusted working relationships.
• Taking part in Universe planning, architecture and design reviews, and representing the APAC team's work and perspective.
• Turning time-zone distance into an advantage with async working models and follow-the-sun progress and support.

• Keeping your team positive, productive and healthy, and leading by example with professionalism and humility.
• Setting clear expectations, tracking progress against objectives and holding regular one-on-ones with your direct reports.
• Mentoring engineers and creating development opportunities that fit each person's goals, including helping them grow as AI changes what great engineering looks like.
• Taking part in hiring, from technical assessments and interviews through to selection.
• Communicating with stakeholders across Moshtix, Universe and Ticketmaster, managing expectations and keeping senior leadership informed through regular formal and informal updates.

• Keeping our platforms stable and performant under spiky demand by planning for major on-sales and launches, leading incident response and running blameless post-incident reviews.
• Taking part in on-call and event support rotations.
• Following change management, quality management, safety and environment company policies.

You'll need 7+ years of experience writing high-quality software in productive engineering teams, including 2+ years as a technical lead or in an equivalent technical leadership role. You should have deep full-stack experience with TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js and React (Next.js a plus), and professional experience in at least one other language such as Go, Ruby or C#.

You should have proven experience designing, running and scaling distributed systems in the cloud (AWS and/or GCP preferred), including event-driven architectures and messaging such as Kafka or EventBridge.

You should have strong API design skills across REST, GraphQL and/or gRPC/protobuf, and solid experience with relational and NoSQL data stores (e.g. Postgres, MSSQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB) and caching.

You should have daily, hands-on use of AI coding tools and agents (e.g. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor), with a clear view of where they help, where they don't, and how to review their output critically.

You should have a strong record of testing, CI/CD and observability practice (e.g. Jest, Playwright, GitHub Actions, Argo CD, Docker, Kubernetes, Grafana).

You should have experience leading legacy modernisation, such as Rails or ASP.NET to modern services, without disrupting a live business.

You should have excellent written and verbal communication, including RFCs, design docs and async hand-offs that colleagues on the other side of the world can act on without a meeting.

You should have demonstrated success working with teams and stakeholders across multiple time zones.

You should have the right to work in New Zealand.

Bonus points for: ticketing, e-commerce or high-traffic on-sale experience; timed-entry, capacity, scheduling or reservation systems; payments and PCI DSS; Go, Rust or Elixir; CDN and edge platforms such as Fastly; building LLM features into products, or designing agentic workflows and their guardrails (e.g. MCP, tool-using agents).

Leads by example: you build trust through professionalism, humility and follow-through. You facilitate conversation, encourage healthy debate and listen with empathy.

Collaborative across continents: you work respectfully across a global, distributed team, share knowledge openly and build bridges between Auckland, Toronto and the rest of Ticketmaster.

Ownership & reliability: you set clear expectations, deliver what you commit to and own outcomes end to end, including the parts AI helped you build.

AI advocate with good judgement: you advocate for and use AI to deliver value sooner, maximising autonomy and efficiency across engineering, product, design and the wider business. You apply good judgement about where and how it's used, and you build that judgement in your team.

Curious & always learning: you're a forever student who stays current as AI reshapes our craft, and you help others do the same.

Pragmatic problem solver: you approach complex scaling challenges with pragmatism and creativity, stay open to alternatives and weigh all sides before deciding.

Self-directed organisation: you manage competing priorities across two platforms, multiple stakeholders and time zones, and keep standards high without close supervision