“The architecture you inherit is a constraint — the architecture you design is a bet.”
Mike Dietz, Staff Software Engineer
- 01
What's the biggest shift in how you work over the last year?
I pair-program with Claude Code for the majority of feature work now. Not as an autocomplete layer — as an actual pairing session where I describe intent and review output. The gap between what I'd write alone and what comes out of the session is smaller than I expected. The remaining gap is almost entirely domain knowledge: how our specific systems behave under load, where the undocumented gotchas are.
- 02
Walk me through a problem you solved using AI that you couldn't have tackled the same way before.
We needed to refactor the session handling layer across eleven services without a coordinated deploy window. I used an agentic loop to generate the migration diffs for each service, ran them against our canary environment, and reviewed the deltas manually before promoting. The whole sequence would have been a three-week project. We ran it in four days. Zero production incidents.
- 03
What would you tell someone considering joining Groupon right now?
The expectation here is that you'll own outcomes, not tasks. If you prefer a world where someone else defines the problem and you implement the solution, this will be uncomfortable. If you want to define both sides of that equation and be accountable for the result, you'll fit. The autonomy is real. So is the accountability.
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We get people offline through quality local experiences at great value. That's still the mission. Everything above is what it takes to deliver it in 2026.