Senior Staff Backend Engineer

Please complete the attached Internal Transfer Request Form and submit.   

Please make sure to apply with your Coupang e-mail address.   

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.  

Role Overview :

The Senior Staff Engineer (Kubernetes) is responsible for designing, building, and optimizing our most critical, large-scale, and highly available systems using Go (Golang) and Kubernetes. This role drives architectural strategy, mentors senior engineering staff, and sets the technical direction for cloud-native adoption and maturity across the organization.

What You Will Do :

• System Architecture & Strategy: Define and evangelize the technical roadmap and long-term architecture for our core cloud-native platforms and services. Ensure all solutions adhere to best practices for reliability, performance, and security.

• High-Performance Golang Development: Design, write, test, and deploy production-ready code in Golang for critical components, APIs, and business logic, prioritizing low latency and high throughput.

• Kubernetes Platform Leadership: Lead the development and maintenance of our internal Kubernetes platform. This includes extending the platform using Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and Operators to automate infrastructure management.

• Operational Excellence: Establish and enforce standards for observability, monitoring, alerting, and logging using Prometheus, Grafana, and related toolchains. Lead efforts to improve system reliability, disaster recovery, and overall operational efficiency.

• Mentorship and Coaching: Act as a technical mentor to senior and mid-level engineers, raising the engineering bar across the organization through design reviews, code reviews, and deep technical training.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with Security, DevOps, and Product teams to translate complex business requirements into robust, scalable technical designs and implementation plans.

• Troubleshooting: Serve as the final escalation point for production issues, performing deep-dive root cause analysis (RCA) on performance and stability problems within the Kubernetes/Golang stack.

Basic Qualifications:

• At least 13 years of progressive experience in software engineering, with a significant focus on cloud-native application development and infrastructure.

• Golang Expertise: Deep, hands-on experience in designing, developing, and deploying high-performance, scalable microservices and distributed systems using Golang. Must be proficient with Go concurrency patterns (goroutines, channels) and best practices for writing clean, testable, and robust Go code.

• Cloud Platforms: Extensive experience with at least one major public cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Architecture & Design: Proven ability to define and implement complex microservices architectures, considering factors like fault tolerance, security, scalability, and cost efficiency.

• DevOps & Automation: Mastery of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) and deep experience in designing and optimizing CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) for Kubernetes deployments.

• Networking & Observability: Strong understanding of Kubernetes networking, service mesh technologies (e.g., Istio, Linkerd), and implementing robust monitoring, logging, and alerting using tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and ELK/Loki stack.

• Leadership: Demonstrated experience mentoring senior engineers, leading technical initiatives, and communicating complex technical concepts to a variety of audiences, including executive leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• Kubernetes Mastery: Expert-level knowledge of Kubernetes internals, architecture, and advanced features.

  • Experience managing and troubleshooting large-scale production Kubernetes clusters (e.g., EKS, AKS, GKE, or self-managed).

  • Expertise in Kubernetes Operators, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and extending the Kubernetes API.

• Certification: Holds at least one, and ideally both, of the following:

  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)

  • Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)

• Advanced Certification: Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS) or a relevant public cloud certification (e.g., AWS Certified Solution Architect - Professional).

• Open Source Contribution: Prior experience contributing to open-source projects, especially those related to Kubernetes or Golang.

• Data Technologies: Experience with cloud-native data stores and streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka, Cassandra, CockroachDB) and deploying them in a Kubernetes environment.

• Security Focus: Experience implementing advanced security practices within a Kubernetes environment, including network policies, RBAC hardening, and secrets management (e.g., Vault).

• GitOps: Hands-on experience implementing and managing GitOps workflows using tools like ArgoCD or Flux.

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. 

Privacy Notice  

• Your personal information will be collected and managed by Coupang as stated in the Application Privacy Notice located below.  

Please complete the attached Internal Transfer Request Form and submit.   

Please make sure to apply with your Coupang e-mail address.