Staff Engineer - Backend

About the Company :

At Coupang we are building the future of ecommerce. 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 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?” 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.

The Gateway Services team builds Coupang’s infrastructure layer for service-to-service communication in a distributed microservices architecture, including discovery, load balancing, failure recovery, metrics, and monitoring. They develop fine-grained traffic control with routing rules, retries, failovers, and fault injection, and manage the policy layer using a management plane. The team also handles a pluggable policy layer and configuration API for access controls, rate limits, and quotas, securing communication with TLS encryption and strong identity-based authentication and authorization.

We seek a Staff Engineer with a deep understanding of security in distributed systems and hands-on experience with Identity providers, Kubernetes, gRPC, and service mesh. You will design the architecture and lead the team to deliver a modern platform powering all Coupang’s internal services.

What You Will Do :

• Gather requirements, design, and build features to enhance application traffic routing for multiple platform teams.
• Work closely with Coupang’s domain teams to implement simple solutions for complex infrastructure problems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and efficiency.
• Lead full stack development projects using Istio, Envoy, JAVA, AWS, Kafka, Kubernetes, gRPC, and service mesh.
• Take ownership of Identity and Access platforms, iterating rapidly and collaborating with a small, talented team.
• Write back-end APIs using REST/GraphQL/Hibernate with Spring-boot and Python frameworks.
• Architect workload and service management infrastructure, developing critical infrastructure components.
• Decompose complex problems into simple solutions, prioritize ruthlessly, and collaborate with Coupang tech leaders to enhance service extensibility and innovation.

Basic Qualifications :

• 12 + years of professional software development experience, including 2+ years as a project tech lead.
• Experience with configuring and maintaining service mesh to handle requests at scale, and hands-on experience in designing and developing large-scale distributed systems in the last 3 years.
• Fluency in one or more of C++, Java, and Go, with a proven track record of delivering mission-critical systems.
• Experience with cloud computing using AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Preferred Qualifications :

• Strong experience in Istio features (rate limiting, authentication, authorization, load balancing, throttling, routing) and configuring Istio control and management planes, and Ingress gateway.
• Deep understanding of network components (virtual networks, route tables, subnets, gateways) and modern web application architecture, API design, performance, and scalability.
• Experience in traffic management (request routing, timeouts, circuit breaking, mirroring, fault injection).
• Experience in CI/CD pipelines, YAML, AWS cloud, Kubernetes, gRPC, and Go language.
• Experience in concurrency, multi-threading, synchronization, non-blocking IO, and operating system kernels.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems (Kafka, Cassandra, Google Spanner).

Equal Opportunities for All

Coupang is an equal opportunity employer. Our unprecedented success could not be possible without the valuable inputs of our globally diverse team.