(AI-First) Engineering Manager

Groupon talks to tens of millions of subscribers through email, push and SMS — and changing a single transactional message takes two weeks, because each one is hard-coded into its own backend service in a ten-year-old stack. Your job is to make it two hours: replace ~120 of those one-off integrations with events a marketer can rearrange themselves in our customer-data platform, and move the whole channel onto Groupon's new TypeScript foundation as you go. You'd lead that turnaround — and still be in the code.

What you'd actually get to build

This is a turnaround, not a greenfield. Today the channel runs on a decade-old stack: each message wired by hand into its own delivery service, subscriber data spread across separate systems, a change measured in weeks. You'd move it — piece by piece, without dropping a single send — onto the modern foundation the rest of Groupon engineering is consolidating on:

• From weeks to hours. Replace ~120 hand-built integrations with events a marketer can rearrange in our customer-data platform (Bloomreach) — so changing a message is a config, not a two-week deploy.
• Onto one modern foundation. Groupon's new TypeScript platform (Encore, built by ex-Netflix engineers): declare a database or queue in a line of code and it's provisioned and observed for you; changes reach production the same day.
• Why now. Groupon runs on infrastructure built for 2,500 engineers, maintained today by ~260. You'd be on the sharp end of fixing that — for a channel that reaches tens of millions.
• AI is native to the new stack — a shared model gateway and coding-assistant rules wired into every service; agents write real code, and review keeps it safe.

Who you'll work with

You'll report to Nikash Ray (VP of Software Engineering) and own Managed Channel delivery end to end, leading a small team (~3 engineers) in Bangalore with stakeholders in Prague and London. It's a hands-on role: you run the cadence and stay in the system design and the code. Not for you if you want to review from a distance. Right for you if you like taking a critical, under-invested system and making it modern, observable, and boring to operate.

A week in the life

• The migration is the mission — wire offer and click events into our customer-data platform, retire the hand-built integrations one by one, and move live traffic onto the new foundation without a customer noticing.
• Event-driven reliability — you design the message flow so a double-send is impossible by construction, not by luck.
• AI-first incident response — during a recent traffic spike, an engineer used AI-assisted analysis to surface misconfigurations that only showed under load, shipped the hardening, then turned the diagnosis into a reusable runbook. That's the pattern you'd set.
• Agents doing the toil — a code-quality gate and a PR-watcher keep routine reviews off people's plates, so attention goes to the hard calls.
• The read stakeholders rely on — Prague and London know where the channel stands because you tell them before they ask.

Signals you're a fit

• You've taken over a system nobody could fully explain and left it documented, observable, and boring to operate.
• You've moved live traffic off a legacy system without customers noticing.
• You've designed a messaging flow where double-sending was impossible by construction, not by luck.
• You've led a team four time zones away and it got stronger, not just managed.
• You've made AI agents part of how a team ships — and you can say exactly where they failed.

We'll dig into these live — bring the specifics. (You're still hands-on, so show us production code you've written recently.)

What success looks like

• Day 0–30: the pipeline is mapped end to end and written down for the first time; you've met every engineer and the Prague/London stakeholders; the delivery cadence runs on you, not on heroics.
• Day 31–60: you own a real slice of the migration yourself, and the first hand-built integrations are retired.
• Day 61–90: message lead time is measurably down (weeks → hours on the first flows), delivery is predictable, and the migration has real dates the whole channel can see.

How we operate

• Extreme ownership — you're the single point of accountability for the channel.
• Speed over comfort — you make good decisions before all the information arrives.
• Impact-obsessed — engagement, subscriber growth, and cost are the numbers you steer by.
• AI-first and disciplined — agents do the toil, review keeps them safe. Agency, not brilliant-jerk.

How we hire — 14 days to a decision

1. Recruiter screen (25 min) — career trajectory, role fit, comp alignment.
2. Foundry Challenge — a real-problem scenario from this role, done in your own time.
3. Hiring-manager interview (60 min) — walk through your Foundry Challenge, a deeper technical discussion, and how you operate.
4. Panel interview (60 min) — the rest of how you operate, plus hands-on technical depth.
5. Debrief & decision — fast; a yes comes with an offer.

Practical notes: Prague · standard employment contract or B2B · three days a week on-site · base salary Prague CZK 1,592,489–2,274,984 plus bonus · we'll ask your base location, work authorization, and the AI tools you use day to day.

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