About the role
<div class="content-intro"><p data-pm-slice="1 1 []">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.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p></div><p>Groupon IQ is the internal platform that powers deal creation, QA, and publishing across the company. The 7-person team can't keep up with the backend incidents IQ generates today, and downstream tribes feel every outage. When this role works, IQ stops being a recurring incident and becomes the boring backbone other tribes rely on.</p> <h2>Who you'll work with</h2> <p>You'll report to Pavel Jakl, B2B Tribe Director. You'll lead a 7-person engineering team across Prague and Bangalore, working in TypeScript on a shared monorepo. Pavel codes himself and expects you to. People management is a side responsibility on top of the engineering work, not a substitute for it. This won't work for anyone who needs a settled roadmap, or who treats AI tools as a threat. Both the org and the work move faster than that.</p> <h2>What you'll be doing</h2> <ul> <li>Owning Groupon IQ's backend reliability hands-on, debugging distributed-system failures, fixing the root cause, and writing the post-mortem that prevents the next one</li> <li>Generating most of your own code through AI agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, your choice) while doing the review that catches what the model doesn't see</li> <li>Setting and enforcing the code-review bar for AI-assisted output across the team, so silent timeouts and broken migrations get caught before they ship</li> <li>Driving technical direction across the shared TypeScript monorepo so a change in one app doesn't quietly break three others downstream</li> <li>Mentoring the 7 engineers reporting to you toward the ownership posture Pavel hires for: take the problem, don't wait for it to be assigned</li> <li>Partnering with the Encore team and the marketing and BI users downstream of IQ, so platform changes land predictably for everyone who depends on them</li> </ul> <h2>What success looks like</h2> <p><strong>Day 30.</strong> You've shipped at least one backend fix to a recurring IQ incident, met all 7 engineers in 1:1s, and identified two reliability risks the team hadn't written down before you arrived.</p> <p><strong>Day 60.</strong> You've defined and rolled out the code-review standard for AI-generated changes, incl