Software Development Engineer III — 3PIP Integrations & Inventory Systems

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. ### **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 - Experi