Staff Backend Engineer

Company Introduction

We exist to wow our customers. We know we’re doing the right thing when we hear our customers say, “How did I 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

Rocket Growth is the 2P marketplace at Coupang. The Supply Chain team within Rocket Growth has the mission to simplify and reduce cost of doing business for Sellers. Our technological solutions enable sellers to ship their inventory to Coupang and let Coupang handle the rest - fulfilment, customer returns, used reselling, vendor returns, etc.

What You Will Do

Serve as a technical lead on our most demanding, cross-functional projects involving Inventory and Promise.

Independently come up with quality architecture and design of systems for new microservices and machine learning pipelines.

Functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straightforward solutions.

Possess expert knowledge in performance, scalability, enterprise distributed architecture, and engineering best practices.

Assist in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and the community on advanced technical issues and helping managers guide the career growth of their team members.

Exert technical influence over multiple teams, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience.

Basic Qualifications

8+ years of experience designing and operating high-scale distributed systems with strict latency and reliability requirements

Excellent hands-on coding ability in Java or other Similar (backend systems at scale)

Deep understanding of system design — API design, concurrency, data modelling, caching strategies, messaging, service-to-service communication (gRPC, REST)

Strong code review skills — ability to identify subtle correctness, performance, and reliability issues in complex codebases

Experience with production-grade systems handling high QPS, large data volumes, or Tier-1 SLAs

Experience with event-driven architectures using Kafka at scale

Experience with multi-region systems

Experience with resilience engineering — circuit breakers, retry strategies, load testing, capacity planning, graceful degradation patterns

Track record of technical leadership — setting architecture direction, driving cross-team alignment, mentoring senior engineers

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in ecommerce, fulfilment, supply chain, logistics, inventory, order management, or planning systems

Experience with optimization systems — solvers (CPLEX, OR-Tools), decision engines, constraint programming, or data-science-integrated production systems

Experience with Agentic AI tools for development and code review — using AI-assisted coding agents (e.g., Cursor, Copilot, Devin, Claude Code) to accelerate development velocity, improve code review quality, and automate repetitive engineering tasks

Experience with Spec-Driven Development — defining system behaviour through specifications (OpenAPI/Swagger, Protocol Buffers, API-first design, contract-first development) before implementation, ensuring well-defined contracts between services

Type of work model

Hybrid

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.

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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