Staff Engineer | Principal Engineer | Hands-on CTO

3cket, a fast-growing tech company, is reshaping the events industry with cutting-edge technology. Our SaaS empowers event organizers, agencies, and brands to create unforgettable experiences through powerful management tools, innovative payment solutions, and real-time analytics for both live and online events. With over 14,000 events deployed, we are trusted by leading event promoters and brands across Portugal, and Spain, and are now expanding into new international markets.

As we scale, we’re looking for a Staff Engineer | Principal Engineer | Hands-on CTO to join our team who not only brings strong technical expertise but also demonstrates:

• Proven ownership of business-critical systems end-to-end
• Strong focus on performance, cost optimisation, and system reliability at scale
• A mindset of accountability, proactivity, and business impact
• Ability to leverage AI tools to accelerate development, improve quality, and increase team productivity

Key Responsibilities

Lead the design, development, and maintenance of scalable backend services primarily using PHP

(Symfony), with Go (Golang) supporting event-driven and high-performance use cases.

• Own critical systems end-to-end, ensuring performance, compliance, and reliability. Build and deliver new services from concept to production (architecture, infrastructure, CI/CD, deployment).
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools to accelerate implementation, debugging, and code quality.

Drive architecture decisions and contribute to the long-term technical vision of the platform.

• Lead architectural improvements for scalability and high-demand scenarios (e.g., queue systems, distributed services).
• Evaluate and integrate AI-driven solutions where they provide clear improvements in system design, automation, or developer efficiency.
• Make pragmatic trade-offs between speed, scalability, and maintainability based on business priorities

Mentor and support other developers, promoting engineering excellence and team autonomy.

• Lead by example through ownership, delivery, and high engineering standards.
• Promote the effective use of AI tools across the team to increase productivity and reduce repetitive work.
• Improve developer productivity via tooling, infrastructure, and AI-assisted workflows.

Collaborate cross-functionally to understand product and business needs, translating them into robust technical solutions.

• Work closely with finance, product, and operations on compliance-heavy and revenue-impacting systems.

Lead and contribute to the transition of legacy monoliths into modular microservices with a focus on scalability, maintainability, and delivery speed.

• Apply pragmatic refactoring strategies while maintaining system stability.Own and manage CI/CD pipelines and ensure best practices in observability, logging, metrics, and error tracking using tools such as Grafana, Datadog, and Bugsnag.
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines across services and environments.
• Ensure zero-downtime deployments and strong observability practices.

Collaborate with DevOps partners to manage cloud infrastructure, primarily on AWS, and containerized environments using Docker and Kubernetes.

• Lead infrastructure improvements and cloud optimisation initiatives.
• Support scalability and reliability through Kubernetes and AWS ecosystem enhancements.

Champion application security best practices across the development lifecycle.

• Implement and enforce security across APIs, authentication, and infrastructure.

Cost Optimisation & Performance Ownership

• Actively identify and reduce infrastructure and third-party costs.
• Improve system performance via caching, indexing, and optimisation strategies.

Reliability & Incident Ownership

• Maintain high availability of production systems.
• Take ownership of incident response and system stability.

Consistently leverages AI-powered development tools as a force multiplier to amplify engineering output, code quality, and delivery speed across the team.

Your Technical Toolkit

• PHP (Symfony): Deep experience with the Symfony ecosystem.
• Golang: Hands-on experience building and maintaining Go-based services, particularly for event-driven and high-performance components.
• Kafka & Event-Driven Architecture: Experience designing and operating asynchronous systems using Kafka, including patterns such as the Outbox Pattern for reliable event publishing.
• Redis: Experience using Redis for caching, performance optimisation, and distributed system support.
• DDD (Domain-Driven Design): Knowledge and experience applying DDD principles in real projects.
• Cloud (AWS): Strong experience with AWS services including EC2, RDS, MSK, and infrastructure management.
• Containers: Skilled in Docker and Kubernetes for orchestration and scaling.
• CI/CD: Experience building and maintaining pipelines across multiple services.
• APIs: Strong track record building RESTful APIs and external integrations.
• Monitoring & Observability: Experience with logging, metrics, cost tracking, and performance monitoring.

You’ll Thrive If You…

• Enjoy the pace and adaptability of a startup environment with real-world delivery constraints.
• Have a product mindset and understand the business impact of technical decisions.
• Are comfortable with technical leadership and ownership of critical systems.
• Take initiative and proactively identify improvements (performance, cost, reliability).
• Use AI tools effectively to maximise productivity and continuously improve your workflow
• Operate effectively under pressure and take responsibility for production stability.
• Communicate clearly and collaborate across teams to align on solutions.
• Think long-term while delivering practical and scalable solutions.