Sr Staff Software Engineer

Coupang is reimagining the shopping experience with the goal of wowing each customer from the instant they open the Coupang app to the moment an order is delivered to their door. Powered by an outstanding end-to-end e-commerce and logistics network and a fanatical culture of customer centricity, Coupang has broken tradeoffs around speed, selection and price. Today, we provide exceedingly fast shipping speeds on millions of items including fresh groceries, delivered within hours nationwide, 365 days a year. We are doing this for millions of consumers in Korea. Korea is home to one of the largest and fastest growing e-commerce opportunities anywhere in the world. 

Coupang has been added into the 2023 fortune 500 list, a ranking U.S-based companies by revenue. We have been named as one of the ‘50 Smartest Companies in the World’ by MIT Technology Review, and as one of Forbes magazine’s ‘30 Global Game Changers.’ In 2020, we placed second on CNBC’s ‘Disruptor 50’ list.  

Job Overview: 

The AI Software Engineering team is responsible Coupang’s on-prem and cloud infrastructure for AI/ML workloads including Coupang’s internal workload management and microservice ecosystem which scales to thousands of microservices. We are in a process to revolutionize our developer experiences and internal infrastructure by adopting the best technologies available.

We are looking for an architect who has deep understanding of distributed system, hands-on experiences in large scale backend services, Kubernetes, Golang and Java based micro services. You will be responsible to design the architecture and lead the team to deliver a modern platform that powers all Coupang’s internal services and ML platform.  

What You Will Do

As a Senior Staff Software Engineer, you will 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 enable ML teams across the company to iterate their projects faster from data/feature engineering, labeling, training, online and offline serving of the models. You will partner closely with cross-functional ML teams to help further adopt and apply our centralized platform wherever applicable, work on feedback, and iterate our products to be more user-friendly and scalable. You will work with Engineers leveraging third-party or open source, to build in-house Machine Learning tools & infrastructure - which will help develop reusable, high-performing Machine Learning systems, and enable fast model development, low-latency serving, and ease of model quality maintenance. You'll have the opportunity to build a large-scale heterogeneous system integrating with GPU/Storage keep it running stable and reliable and be involved in the decision-making process.

In this role, you will:

• Architect workload and service management infrastructure.  

• Hands-on develop critical infrastructure components. 
• 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 Coupang’s growing Application infrastructure.
• Align with stakeholders, develop strong developers and provide technical guidance to engineers on critical projects to resolve complex business problems.
• 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.

  
Qualifications

• One who has bachelor’s degree in computer science or related technical fields. 
• One who has 10+ years professional software development experience, or 8 years’ experience with advanced degree.  
• One who has 4+ years’ experience of project tech lead. 
• One who has 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 and Go.
• Proven track record of delivering mission critical systems.
• Experience developing and growing senior individual contributors globally.
• Experience with cloud computing using AWS or Azure or GCP.

      
  
Preferred Qualifications 

• One who has experience in Kubernetes, gRPC. 
• One who has experience in concurrency, multi-threading, synchronization, and non-blocking IO. 
• One who has deep understanding of operating system kernel and distributed system such as Kafka, Cassandra and Mongo DB.
• Proficient in some of the ML training and deployment frameworks like: Tensorflow, PyTorch, TensorRT, Triton backend etc.
• Deep understanding of Machine Learning best practices like training/serving skew minimization, A/B test, feature engineering, model selection. Working knowledge on ML algorithms like gradient boosted trees, neural networks/deep learning, optimization. And domains like NLP, computer vision etc.
• Good understanding of features that help Platform to keep up with the latest advancement of generative AI and large language models.
• Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment and leading the delivery of large-scale services for complex business offerings.
• Ability to influence cross functional stakeholders, prioritize ruthlessly, Aim High and Find a Way to deliver results with grit.
• One who is capable of or is fluent in English communication.  
• One who has master or PhD degree in computer science or other related technical fields.