“You don't improve a system by adding to it — you improve it by understanding what it's actually doing.”
James Hill, Senior Backend Engineer
- 01
What's the biggest shift in how you work over the last year?
Debugging changed most for me. I used to read stack traces and grep logs manually for thirty minutes before I had a hypothesis. Now I pipe the trace into a Claude session with service context and get three ranked hypotheses in two minutes. I still have to evaluate them — the model is wrong often enough that you can't skip that step — but the starting point is radically better.
- 02
What does a typical week look like when agents are actually in the loop?
I own two backend services: the booking confirmation pipeline and part of the merchant integration layer. Agents write the first draft of any new endpoint. I review it, run it against our integration test suite, and push. The part that takes time is not writing code — it's knowing which contract the new endpoint has to respect across six downstream consumers. That's the judgment no agent has yet.
- 03
What would you tell someone considering joining Groupon right now?
Come with opinions. We're still making decisions about how to structure agentic systems that will be load-bearing in two years. If you want to be a consumer of other people's architectural decisions, there are quieter places to do that. Here, the decisions are live and yours to influence.
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