Director Back- End Engineering

Company Introduction  

We exist to wow our customers. We know we're doing the right thing when we hear our customers say, "How did we ever live without Coupang?" Born out of an obsession to make shopping, eating, and living easier than ever, we're collectively disrupting the multi-billion-dollar e-commerce industry from the ground up. We are one of the fastest-growing e-commerce companies that established an unparalleled reputation for being a dominant and reliable force in South Korean commerce.   

We are proud to have the best of both worlds — a startup culture with the resources of a large global public company. This fuels us to continue our growth and launch new services at the speed we have been since our inception. We are all entrepreneurs surrounded by opportunities to drive new initiatives and innovations. At our core, we are bold and ambitious people that like to get our hands dirty and make a hands-on impact. At Coupang, you will see yourself, your colleagues, your team, and the company grow every day.  

Our mission to build the future of commerce is real. We push the boundaries of what's possible to solve problems and break traditional tradeoffs. Join Coupang now to create an epic experience in this always-on, high-tech, and hyper-connected world. 
  

Director of Engineering – AI Workspace

As a Director of Engineering, you will be required to keep and raise the bar of engineering excellence, setting up growth paths and structure for the team, establishing best practices for the team to function efficiently.

 Software Engineering team builds and maintains the foundational infrastructure and developer tools that power the AI lifecycle. Our responsibilities include a robust Resource Manager and a suite of AI development tools such as Workflow Orchestration, Model Insights, Model Registry, and more—enabling customers to seamlessly create, manage, and monitor their AI workloads.

What You Will Do

As a Director of Engineering, you will lead the team building AI workspace functions and partner with leaders of multiple platform teams. You will work closely with the product team to define and implement simple solutions of complex infrastructure problems while ensuring to build a highly scalable, reliable and efficient platform for our customers.

You will technically guide teams working on full stack development teams using JAVA, AWS, Kafka, Kubernetes, Kubeflow, Argo CD and gRPC. You will be accountable for hiring and developing technical leaders and top talent, raising the bar on engineering and operational excellence.

• Lead the design of scalable, event-driven microservices for optimized resource management.
• Design a next-generation Resource Manager and AI developer tools, enabling efficient, secure, and policy-compliant data access across hybrid environments.
• Manage and mentor a team of backend engineers and ensure delivery of team OKRs and roadmap.
• Ensure reliability, observability, and performance of backend systems through rigorous testing and monitoring.
• Decompose complex problems into simple, straightforward solutions, providing mechanisms for the teams to prioritize ruthlessly and "move with urgency".
• Envision roadmaps for the scalable and robust growth of Workspace infrastructure.
• Collaborate with Product owner, TPMs, and Compliance teams to define end-to-end ML model development lifecycle experiences. Proactively drive Workspace initiatives and align with stakeholders.
• Demonstrate excellence resulting in scalable systems and services with the highest quality architecture and design.
• Dive deep into critical system issues, proactively addressing similar root causes, and raise the bar on Operational Excellence.
• Collaborate with other Coupang tech leaders to make the service extensible to unlock opportunities for innovations.

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or related technical fields.
• 15+ years professional software development experience
• 5+ years of experience managing teams of software engineers 
• Track record of building multi-tenant, financial-grade cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Expertise in stream processing, distributed stateful services, immutable data models.
• Experience with technologies like Redis, Kafka, workflow orchestration, model insights and storage systems.
• Strong communication skills with ability to influence org-wide technical decisions.
• Hands-on experience in designing and developing large scale distributed system in the last 4 years.
• One who is fluent in one or more among Java, Go and Python.
• Proven track record of delivering mission critical systems.
• Experience with cloud computing using AWS or Azure or GCP.
• Experienced in Machine learning job deployment infrastructure like Argo CD workflow.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in Kubernetes, gRPC, Spring.
• Experience in AI model lifecycle.
• Deep expertise in Java Spring Boot, Hibernate, and RESTful API design.
• Understanding data governance, compliance, and access control in distributed systems.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration in production environments.
• Experience in concurrency, multi-threading, synchronization, and non-blocking IO.
• Deep understanding of operating system kernel and distributed system such as Kafka, Cassandra, ClickHouse and Mongo DB.
• Experience integrating with AI/ML frameworks or pipelines (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, ONNX).
• Experience with observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and cloud-native development practices.

Our Hybrid work model

Coupang hybrid work model is designed to enable a culture of collaboration that acts a catalyst to enrich the experience of employees. Employees are required to work at least 3 days in the office per week, with the flexibility to work from home 2 days a week, depending on the role requirement. Some businesses may require more time in office due to nature of work.

Equal Opportunities for All 

Coupang is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to equal opportunity regardless of color, ancestry, religion, sex, nation origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status. Our unprecedented success could not be possible without the valuable inputs of our globally diverse team.

Details to consider 

• Those eligible for employment protection (recipients of veteran's benefits, the disabled, etc.) may receive preferential treatment for employment in accordance with applicable laws. 
   

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