Director - Backend Engineering (Infrastructure)

About the Company

Coupang is an innovative e-commerce leader known for revolutionizing the shopping, dining, and living experience, aiming to simplify everyday life for customers. As one of the fastest-growing companies in South Korea, Coupang operates with a unique blend of startup agility and the capabilities of a global public organization. The company nurtures entrepreneurial spirit, encourages bold initiatives, and fosters rapid service launches to build the future of commerce in a high-tech, highly connected environment.

Role Overview

Joining the Application Infrastructure organization, this newly formed team focuses on developing complex, large-scale workflow systems integral to Coupang's operations. The role involves designing and implementing a reliable, highly available distributed workflow platform that supports hundreds of domain teams and handles hundreds of millions in revenue. You will lead the architectural vision and delivery of this platform aimed at enabling developers to create robust, long-lasting workflows as code.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the full lifecycle design and development of a distributed workflow engine from initial concept to delivery, ensuring architectural quality and code performance.
• Ensure system reliability by targeting extremely high availability (99.9999%), focusing on latency optimizations and handling edge cases in state management.
• Incorporate AI and ML technologies to automate predictive scaling, bottleneck detection, and error recovery, enhancing system resilience and customer satisfaction.
• Address complex challenges such as distributed locking, timers, and deterministic execution while making data-driven decisions based on traffic analytics.
• Manage and mentor a team of up to 10 engineers, fostering growth and cross-functional collaboration to develop infrastructure that meets strategic business goals.
• Work closely with product teams to align platform capabilities with company-wide operational requirements.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field.
• Minimum 8 years of backend software development experience.
• Strong expertise in Java and the Spring Framework.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms, especially AWS.
• Proven background in building and maintaining highly available, distributed systems.
• Experience leading teams ranging from 5 to 10 engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• At least 12 years of professional software development experience focused on backend infrastructure for global-scale traffic.
• A minimum of 3 years managing teams of 5-10 engineers.
• Demonstrated ability to maintain systems with five to six nines of availability, prioritizing zero downtime and excellent user experience.
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems architecture, including databases, messaging queues, and orchestration tools.
• Advanced skills in Java and Python, with strong understanding of concurrency and memory management.
• Experience or visionary understanding of integrating AI/ML for automating system operations.
• Familiarity with Temporal or Cadence programming models and architectures.
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes and containerization technologies.
• Experience with stateful databases such as Cassandra and TiDB is preferred.
• Open-source contributions to major distributed systems projects are a plus.
• Expertise in observability solutions like distributed tracing and telemetry for proactive system monitoring.

Recruitment Process

• The hiring procedure includes application review, phone interview, onsite or virtual onsite interview, followed by offer.
• The process may be adjusted based on scheduling or other considerations, with all communications sent via the applicant’s provided email.

Additional Information

• The job posting can close early if all positions are filled.
• Employment offers may be withdrawn if any application information is found false.
• Applicants eligible for employment protections, such as veterans or persons with disabilities, may receive priority according to laws.
• Job roles and responsibilities could be modified relative to candidate experience prior to offer acceptance.
• Hiring may be contingent on meeting legal qualifications and work requirements.

Technologies in Use

• AWS Cloud Services
• Kubernetes
• Python Programming
• Java Development