Job Description
Groupon connects 42 million customers with local experiences - restaurants, events, wellness and travel - and the million-plus merchants who deliver them. Our mission is to get people offline and into the real world at prices that make it possible. We're an AI-native company in the middle of a platform transformation, moving from a deals marketplace to an experience discovery platform that works for customers and merchants at the same time.
The systems that power how merchants create, price, and submit deals are being rebuilt from scratch. Deals flows through infrastructure built for a different era: merchants who want to update a deal today wait hours for a platform that should respond in seconds. This role owns the full-stack engineering of the replacement, TypeScript end-to-end, observable from day one, with AI tooling built into the development cycle as infrastructure rather than an experiment.
Who you'll work with
You'll report to Mayank Jain, Manager, Software Engineering II, who owns end-to-end tooling for the Deal Creation team inside Groupon IQ. The team is 4 engineers working across Europe and Bangalore. There is no separate platform or ops team to hand work off to: engineers make and defend their own technical calls and own what they ship. If you need a settled roadmap and clearly scoped tickets to feel productive, this team will frustrate you.
What you'll be doing
- Designing and building the APIs and frontend interfaces that commercial operations and merchant-facing products depend on, with documented trade-offs and one named owner at every layer from database to UI
- Migrating core deal management services from Java to TypeScript/Node.js, reducing operational complexity while keeping production stable across the transition
- Owning SLOs and observability for your systems: writing the dashboards, setting the thresholds, and closing the gap yourself when something degrades
- Shipping features across the full stack, from design through frontend integration, rollout, and post-production monitoring, without handoffs at each stage
- Using Cursor and Claude as working infrastructure: the team generates over 95% of its code with AI, and you'll be directing, reviewing, and auditing that output daily as a core part of how work gets done
- Writing RFCs and design docs before committing to architectural decisions, so the team has a written record of trade-offs they can act on without coming back to you to explain it
What success looks like
Day 30: You've shipped at least one change to a production service, you understand the data model underpinning deal creation end-to-end, and you've named one gap — in observability, in the data model, or in the frontend — that nobody has written down yet.
Day 60: You've led a design review for a non-trivial feature touching both frontend and backend, you're using AI tooling in your development cycle and can describe specifically what changed in your output because of it, and your work moves without a check-in.
Day 90: You've completed or meaningfully progressed a Java-to-TypeScript migration for at least one service, you're the named owner of those systems, and you've written a design doc that influenced a decision beyond your own sprint.
What this role demands
- Ship production-quality TypeScript and Node.js across the full stack: code that survives high traffic, holds up in review, and can be debugged by someone other than its author
- Hold your own on both frontend and backend: you can build a clean API, wire it to a UI, and reason about where a performance problem actually lives
- Read and refactor Java safely enough to migrate legacy services without introducing regressions — you don't need to be a specialist, but you need to be honest about what you're changing
- Trace a latency regression across distributed service boundaries, write the root cause analysis, and implement the fix that prevents recurrence
- Use AI coding tools as a genuine productivity multiplier: you've made specific decisions about what to delegate to Cursor or Claude, you can audit what the agent produced, and you can explain where you drew the line
How we operate
Extreme Ownership: Your name is on the system. When an SLO degrades or a migration creates an incident, you own the diagnosis and the fix without waiting to be assigned it.
Speed Over Comfort: The TypeScript migration is live and moving. You'll ship before everything is perfect and make architectural calls with incomplete information. Engineers who wait for full alignment slow everyone down.
Disciplined: The team generates over 95% of its code with AI. That makes rigour more important, not less — readable code, observable systems, and documented decisions are what keep this codebase navigable when it's growing fast.
#LI-Hybrid #marci
Groupon is an AI-First Company
We’re committed to building smarter, faster, and more innovative ways of working and AI plays a key role in how we get there. We encourage candidates to leverage AI tools during the hiring process where it adds value, and we’re always keen to hear how technology improves the way you work. If you’re passionate about AI or curious to explore how it can elevate your role you’ll be right at home here.
Groupon’s purpose is to build strong communities through thriving small businesses. To learn more about the world’s largest local e-commerce marketplace, click here. You can also find out more about us in the latest Groupon news as well as learning about our DEI approach. If all of this sounds like something that’s a great fit for you, then click apply and join us on a mission to become the ultimate destination for local experiences and services.
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