Principal Engineer, SRE

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) at Coupang is a mission-critical role that combines software and system engineering to build, run, and scale our complex, large-scale e-commerce systems. As part of the Site Reliability Engineering team, you will be responsible for ensuring all our customer-facing services are healthy, monitored, automated, and designed to scale. As an SRE organization, we take pride in handling “operations as an engineering” problem with automation automation-first approach. You will use your background to build best-in-class infrastructure automation for areas such as Observability, Incident Management, Disaster Recovery, Load testing, Capacity engineering, and many more. In this role, you will work very closely with our product development teams from an early stage of design to all the way helping resolve any production incidents, maintaining SLI/SLA bar for production services, and influencing them with SRE principles and best practices. If you take pride in complete ownership, have a passion for solving complex technical challenges for large-scale distributed systems, and demeanor to work and communicate effectively across team boundaries, this is the role for you!  

Key Responsibilities: 

• Serve as a primary point responsible for the reliability, health, and performance of all Coupang customer-facing services.  

• Gain deep knowledge of Coupang application workflow and dependencies.  

• Spearheading and conceptualizing revolutionary designs in critical service architecture.  

• Conducting comprehensive architecture reviews leading re-architecting initiatives to set industry-leading benchmarks in performance, reliability, and availability. 

• Lead and drive large-scale technical initiatives across multiple engineering teams.  

• Be able to drive collaboration effectively across organizational boundaries, be able to build strong stakeholder relationships to achieve broad organizational objectives.  

• Identify and implement scalable solutions for complex technical problems. Be the change driver.  

• Self-motivated to be able to navigate the ambiguity with large initiatives and find solutions to accomplish the goal.  

• Be the SRE champion/lead working with the rest of the technical leaders across Coupang to define and drive the engineering roadmap.  

• Contribute towards hiring and building a world-class team. Mentor and coach junior engineers on the team.  

• Communicate effectively with people at all levels of the organization. 

Essential Qualifications: 

• 10+ years of industry experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems.  

• Deep UNIX/Linux systems knowledge and administration background. 

• Strong programming skills in one or more of Python, Java, Golang, or C++.  

• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills spanning systems, networks (TCP/IP), and code, with a focus on data-driven decision-making. 

• Proficient with cloud-based infrastructure, including AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. 

• Strong understanding of DevOps and SRE practices, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, and infrastructure as code (IaC). 

• Proficient with containerization and orchestration technologies, such as Docker and Kubernetes. 

• Knowledge of observability ecosystem including metrics, logging, tracing, and tools, such as Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic Stack, Datadog, or New Relic. 

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work with teams across distinct functions and technical domains. 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Master’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related technical field.  

• Prior experience working with large-scale web-based Java architectures and JVM configuration. 

• Professional certifications in cloud platforms, monitoring tools, or related technologies. 

• Previous experience working on a large-scale e-commerce platform.