Software Development Engineer

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.