Who We Are

We are the LivingSocial Brand Product and Engineering team. Both Groupon.com and LivingSocial.com (and their native apps) are built on a single platform with overlapping merchants and products.

Our team supports the LivingSocial brand on this platform--a brand that’s being reinvented to serve a different market in a different way. This can mean everything from revising the current user experience to improving internal marketing and research tools to developing new products and services. Like the reinvented brand, we’re small and scrappy. The opportunities are exciting.

How We Work

Our team is distributed across US time zones. We have daily virtual stand-ups, chatting in our project rooms, pass tickets around, and hop on voice and video calls to coordinate and collaborate. We’re all self-motivated and comfortable switching between interaction modes as our work demands, but we’re just as happy to leave work alone when we’ve put in our 40 hours for the week.

At any one time, we may be working on a project that crosses a dozen apps and services. We’re comfortable reaching out to other teams to figure out how we can get some of our requirements on their schedule or to build up some code and changes we can work with them to test and deploy.

Our work has a broad scope. We’re unlikely to be pigeonholed into developing and maintaining a single narrow codebase for multiple years. On the flip side, we’re comfortable not knowing everything and being willing to pick up new tools, APIs, and even platforms.

We prefer an agile approach, where we use a minimal and evolving process to work together more effectively. Within the larger organization, we follow a yearly and quarterly planning process to set our strategies and priorities. Our weekly and daily process focuses on reducing risk, understanding and committing to small and manageable pieces of work, and learning as much as possible.

What We Value

We aspire to be pragmatic, to do the right things and provide real value to our stakeholders. We encourage frequent communication inside and outside of the team, across media and mechanisms. We enjoy contributing to things even outside of our team, learning new things, and being good citizens of the organization as a whole. We learn frequently and share our knowledge.

What We Expect

You are:

• Kind and helpful
• Comfortable working closely with a team
• Available daily during core working hours, generally 9 am - 1 pm Central (-0600 UTC)
• Dependable when working in a distributed fashion, but open to travel a couple of times a year for team meetings in the US
• Interested in being influential in a small team
• Open to the benefits of working for a large and public US corporation
• Agile in process and process changes
• Flexible as business needs change
• Enthusiastic to write tests
• Interested in rapid feedback supported by data and experiments
• Willing and able to use your influence to effect change
• Capable of planning your daily work without direct technical supervision

Tools We Use

Our platform has a microservices architecture, with three main stacks:

• Node/Express JS for front-end work, primarily server-side rendering
• Ruby/Rails for backend work
• Java/Dropwizard/Maven for backend work

We use several other technologies, including but not limited to:

• MySQL/PostgreSQL
• Splunk
• REST/JSON
• Deployment to our own datacenters
• GitHub: Enterprise
• JIRA

Experience with these platforms and tools is helpful. We can teach you the nuances of these.

Groupon provides a global marketplace where people can buy just about anything, anywhere, anytime. We’re enabling real-time commerce across an expanding range of categories including local businesses, travel destinations, consumer products, and live or lively events. At the same time, we are providing advertising options and tools that merchants can use to grow and manage their businesses. Culturally, we believe that great people make great companies and that starting with the customer and working backward moves us forward. Community matters to us on an internal, local and global scale—it’s fundamental to our company’s growth and to the well-being of the world at large. We also value self-awareness, candor, lunch and WiFi. If we match with you, please apply to join us.