Senior Backend Engineer - Bookability & Gifting Integrations

Groupon is a marketplace where customers discover new experiences and services everyday and local businesses thrive. To date we have worked with over a million merchant partners worldwide, connecting over 16 million customers with deals across various categories. In a world often dominated by e-commerce giants, we stand out as one of the few platforms uniquely committed to helping local businesses succeed on a performance basis.

Groupon is on a radical journey to transform our business with relentless pursuit of results. Even with thousands of employees spread across multiple continents, we still maintain a culture that inspires innovation, rewards risk-taking and celebrates success. The impact here can be immediate due to our scale and the speed of our transformation. We're a 'best of both worlds' kind of company. We're big enough to have the resources and scale, but small enough that a single person has a surprising amount of autonomy and can make a meaningful impact.

About the Role🤖 Power Groupon’s Next Chapter with AI-Driven Innovation

Are you a passionate, energetic technologist who thrives in fast-paced environments and enjoys working across evolving technology stacks? 
We’re looking for an SDE III to join the Bookablity & Gifting Integrations team. You will help design, build, and operate systems that sit at the intersection of business and engineering—supporting critical workflows across inventory management, fulfillment, and gifting.

🌐Our Technology Landscape (Today & Tomorrow)Our platform is evolving, and we want engineers who are excited to grow with it.🧱Current Stack:

• Backend services are primarily in Java
• Cloud infrastructure on AWS
• Relational databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL
• REST / JSON APIs
• CI / CD - Jenkins
• Message brokers
• Docker, Kubernetes
• GitHub, JIRA, ELK

🚀Future Direction (Key Focus)

• Moving towards Encore (TypeScript-first backend services)
• Building on GCP with Encore as a core development framework
• Emphasis on modern cloud-native architecture, service ownership, and developer productivity

While experience with Java and AWS is important today, every new engineer should be excited about—and willing to actively contribute to—our transition toward a TypeScript and GCP-based ecosystem.

🛠️What You’ll Do:

• Design and develop services within Groupon’s microservices ecosystem
• Work on highly scalable e-commerce systems involving inventory, fulfillment, and gifting
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver business features and ensure compliance requirements are met
• Build service artifacts, plan deployments, and coordinate timelines with project and partner teams
• Improve system reliability by defining service-level metrics, setting alerting thresholds, and automating responses
• Create and maintain clear technical documentation
• Mentor junior engineers and support their technical growth
• Drive technical discussions and influence architectural decisions within the team

🎓We’re Excited About You If You Have:

• BE/BTech or ME/MTech in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
• 6+ years of industry experience building and operating production systems
• Strong coding skills in Java, with openness to learning TypeScript
• Solid computer science fundamentals (Design Patterns, Data Structures & Algorithms, Operating Systems, DBMS)
• Experience with relational databases such as MySQL or PostgreSQL
• Exposure to NoSQL databases is a plus
• Exposure to AI tools like Cursor, Claude
• Experience developing and supporting web applications in transactional environments.
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills
• Good communication and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Interest or experience in cloud platforms (AWS today, GCP tomorrow) is highly valued

🤖 AI-First & Automation Expectations
At Groupon, AI and automation are core to engineering. For this role, we’re looking for someone who:
Must Have (Mindset & Behaviors):

• AI-first developer workflow: Uses AI assistants (Cursor, Clause, copilot etc) daily for coding, debugging, refactoring, test generation, and documentation. Can provide concrete examples where AI adoption increased throughput or code quality.
• Problem decomposition and validation: Naturally breaks down ambiguous requirements into actionable tasks, writes precise prompts or specifications, and validates AI-generated outputs with robust tests, logs, or code review. Approaches AI use with 'trust but verify,' ensuring safe integration into production.
• Automation mindset: Routinely automates repetitive activities—ticket drafting, documentation, runbooks, release notes, incident summaries, migrations, etc.—via scripts, bots, or lightweight agents.

'Demonstrated experience using AI tools to speed up day-to-day engineering work (e.g., for code, tests, docs, debugging, or ops tasks).'
'Strong ability to decompose ambiguous problems and validate solutions with test/observability coverage.'
Nice to Have (Practical AI/Automation Skills):

• Built or integrated LLM-powered automations or agents (tool/function calling, code review bots, ticket/runbook automation, etc.)
• Familiarity with integrating workflow tools using protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) or equivalent
• Hands-on with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as a builder/user—including embedding, chunking, retrieval, and knowing when NOT to use RAG
• Skilled at prompt engineering for structured outputs. constraint setting, iterative refinement
• Writes/uses “guardrail” tests to validate all code, especially AI-generated

'Nice to have: built LLM-powered workflow automations/agents (tool calling, code review bots, ticket/runbook generation, etc.).'
'Nice to have: practical familiarity with RAG patterns and evaluation of AI output.'

⭐We Value Engineers Who Are:

• Customer-focused – You understand that customer impact drives everything we build
• Obsessed with Quality – Your production code is reliable, scalable, and maintainable
• Team players – You collaborate, listen, and give constructive feedback
• Fast learners – You enjoy learning new technologies and applying them quickly
• Pragmatic – You balance speed and quality, knowing when trade-offs make sense
• Owners – You take responsibility for outcomes and actively contribute to business success

 

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.

Beware of Recruitment Fraud: Groupon follows a merit-based recruitment process without charging job seekers any fees. We've noticed an increase in recruitment fraud, including fake job postings and fraudulent interviews and job offers aimed at stealing personal information or money. Be cautious of individuals falsely representing Groupon's Talent Acquisition team with fake job offers. If you encounter any suspicious job offers or interview calls demanding money, recognize these as scams. Groupon is not responsible for losses from such dealings. For legitimate job openings (and a sneak peek into life at Groupon), always check our official career website at Groupon Careers