Software Development Engineer III

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.

About the team

A large part of Groupon's experiences business — tours, attractions, live events, days out — runs on inventory Groupon doesn't own itself. The 3PIP Integrations & Inventory Systems team builds the platform that makes that work: connecting Groupon to its third-party partners, and making sure a customer can find something they want, book it, pay for it, and actually use it, smoothly, from end to end.

It's an interesting place to sit, because we're the layer that has to make independent systems agree with each other. Every partner models their world a little differently. Groupon's own platform — commerce, ordering, catalog, scheduling, notifications — has a shape of its own. Our job is to hold all of that together so the experience feels like one coherent thing to the customer.

The problems we enjoy working on:

• Getting distributed state right — many systems, many things happening at once, and one answer that has to be correct
• Designing for recovery — customer journeys move through several steps, and the platform should handle it gracefully when one of them doesn't go to plan
• Treating integration as a platform problem — every new partner should be easier to bring on than the last, which means building good abstractions rather than one-off solutions
• Making the system observable and calm — metrics, alerting, and automation so the platform behaves predictably and stays quiet

We value engineers who are ready to take up ownership. Areas here are owned end to end — design, build, deploy, monitor, and support — and the people who own them are trusted to make the architectural calls that come with that. We favor clear design conversation over heavy process, and we invest in tooling that keeps engineering effort on the problems worth solving.

About the role

We're looking for a strong SDE III to take ownership of a meaningful part of this platform and the challenges that come with it.

There is a lot in front of us. We're continuously growing the range and volume of inventory the platform supports, and at the same time modernizing it so that it integrates more easily and serves a wider set of customer needs. Scaling what exists while reshaping the foundations underneath it is where most of the interesting engineering sits — and it's where this role lives. You'll have an area of the platform as your own rather than a queue of tickets, a genuine say in its architecture, and a direct hand in where it goes over the next few years.

In this role you'll be:

• Owning parts of the platform end to end, so that customers can discover, book, pay for, and use what they've bought without friction
• Designing and building services in Groupon's microservices ecosystem, and modernizing existing ones as the platform evolves
• Strengthening the core platform itself — the abstractions, data model, and tooling that everything else is built on
• Bringing new inventory and new partners onto the platform, and making each one easier than the last
• Keeping the systems you own healthy — defining metrics and alerting, investigating behavior that spans several services, and turning what you find into durable fixes
• Shaping technical design discussions and influencing architecture decisions
• Mentoring engineers earlier in their careers, and raising the bar on code review and design quality

The work spans both partner-facing integration and core platform engineering, and most engineers here do some of each. 

Our technology

Today

• Java 21 backend services (Dropwizard), PostgreSQL / MySQL
• REST/JSON APIs, Kafka, state-machine-driven workflow orchestration
• GCP and AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins CI/CD
• GitHub, Jira, ELK

Where we're going

• TypeScript-first backend services built on Encore, running on GCP
• Cloud-native architecture with strong service ownership and a focus on developer productivity

Java depth is what you'll draw on from day one. The move toward TypeScript and GCP is real and already underway — something you'll help shape rather than inherit, and one of the more interesting learning opportunities on the team right now.

How we work with AI

AI agentic workflows are part of how this team builds — implementation, code review, investigation, and operational work — and we pay attention to the difference they make. Familiarity with tools like Claude Code or Cursor is valuable, and an interest in working this way matters more than existing expertise. We're still learning where these tools help most and where they don't, and we'd like the person in this role to bring their own judgment to that question.

Support and growth

• Wide ownership, with the context, access, and trust needed to act on it
• Hands-on work with a modern stack — TypeScript, Encore, and GCP — on real production systems
• A shared on-call rotation, with engineering time deliberately set aside for removing recurring alerts rather than living with them
• Mentorship in both directions — senior engineers here teach, and also learn from the people they work with
• Room to influence direction, including which parts of the platform get invested in next

We'd love to hear from you if you have

• 6+ years building and operating production systems, with strong hands-on Java
• Solid CS fundamentals — data structures, algorithms, design patterns, databases, operating systems
• Real experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL or MySQL), including reasoning about queries, indexes, and transactions at scale
• Experience with systems where correctness matters and many things happen concurrently
• Comfort tracing behavior across multiple systems to its actual root cause
• Clear written and verbal communication with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• A degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Also useful: third-party API integration experience, e-commerce or ticketing domain background, NoSQL exposure, TypeScript or Node.js, or experience working with compliance requirements such as SOX or PCI.

If you don't match every point above but these are the problems you want to be working on, we'd still like to hear from you.

What we value as a team

• Ownership — we measure ourselves by outcomes, not tickets closed
• Craft — reliable, maintainable code, because we operate what we build
• Customer focus — a booking is someone's evening out or family day, and we build like that matters
• Pragmatism — knowing which trade-offs are cheap and which ones compound
• Curiosity — the stack under us is changing, and that's part of the appeal

If this sounds like the kind of platform you'd enjoy building, we'd love to talk.

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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