Director of Backend Engineering - Infrastructure

About Coupang

Coupang is dedicated to revolutionizing the e-commerce experience by making shopping, dining, and living simpler and more efficient. As one of the fastest expanding e-commerce enterprises, it commands a strong reputation for reliability and dominance in South Korea. Coupling a startup mindset with the capabilities of a global public company, Coupang empowers its team members to innovate rapidly and take ownership of new initiatives. Their ambitious culture encourages hands-on engagement, fostering growth for individuals and the company alike.

Role Overview

Within the Application Infrastructure organization, you will lead a pioneering team responsible for designing and developing a distributed workflow engine from the ground up. This system supports hundreds of domain teams by enabling swift creation of complex workflows critical to services like rapid delivery. Managing a platform that handles hundreds of millions in revenue, this role offers the rare opportunity to build an extremely reliable large-scale workflow service.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead full-cycle architectural design and implementation of a robust, distributed workflow engine.
• Recruit, manage, and nurture a high-performing team while establishing rigorous standards for architecture and code quality.
• Ensure extreme system availability targeting 99.9999%, analyzing performance edge cases and distributed state management intricacies.
• Integrate AI and machine learning models to automate platform behaviors such as predictive scaling, bottleneck identification, and intelligent error recovery.
• Tackle complex technical challenges in distributed locking, timers, and deterministic execution, basing decisions on data insights from heavy traffic analysis.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product teams to align infrastructure solutions with organizational goals and customer expectations.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or equivalent.
• At least 8 years’ experience in backend software development.
• Strong expertise in Java and the Spring Framework.
• Hands-on experience working in cloud platforms, especially AWS.
• Proven ability to architect and maintain highly available distributed systems.
• Experience leading engineering teams of between 5 and 10 members.

Preferred Qualifications

• Over 12 years of professional software development experience with a focus on backend infrastructure at global scale.
• 3+ years managing engineering teams of 5-10 developers.
• Demonstrated success in operating systems with 99.999% or higher availability, ensuring uninterrupted customer experience.
• Deep knowledge of designing and launching critical distributed systems like databases, messaging services, or orchestration platforms.
• Expertise in Java and Python programming, including concurrency and memory management.
• Experience or visionary capability to leverage AI/ML in automating system operations and maintenance tasks.
• Familiarity with Temporal or Cadence workflow programming models and architecture, plus experience with Kubernetes and container ecosystems.
• Experience using stateful databases such as Cassandra and TiDB is advantageous.
• Open source participation in major distributed systems projects is a bonus.
• Proficiency in creating observable systems using distributed tracing and telemetry to preemptively identify problems.

Additional Information

• Recruitment Steps: Application review, phone interview, onsite or virtual onsite interview, and offer stage.
• The hiring process order and interviews may be adjusted based on circumstances.
• Communication regarding interview schedules and results will be sent via email provided during application.
• Coupang reserves the right to close the job posting early if all vacancies are filled and may rescind offers based on false application information.
• Preferences may be given to candidates eligible for employment protection according to applicable laws.
• Job titles and responsibilities may be adjusted based on experience and will be communicated prior to offers.
• Employment may be contingent upon meeting legal requirements necessary for employment and performance.
• Personal data collected during application will be managed as per Coupang's privacy policy.