Director of Backend Engineering (Infrastructure)

About the role

As a leader in Coupang's Application Infrastructure organization, you will build a next‑generation durable execution platform that powers critical workflow systems for hundreds of domain teams. This greenfield effort will create a highly scalable, fault‑tolerant service that handles billions of dollars of revenue and sets new standards for availability and AI‑driven automation.

Key responsibilities

• Architect from Zero: lead end‑to‑end design of a distributed workflow engine.
• Define extreme availability: design for 5‑6 nines (99.9999 %) uptime and dive deep into tail latency and edge cases.
• AI‑driven automation: integrate AI/ML models for predictive scaling, bottleneck detection and intelligent error recovery.
• Solve hard problems: address distributed locking, timers and deterministic execution while being data‑driven.
• Team leadership: manage a team of up to 10 engineers and collaborate across the organization.
• Stakeholder management: work cross‑functionally with product teams to provide infrastructure that meets business needs.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Math or a related field.
• 8+ years of backend software development experience.
• Proficiency in Java and the Spring Framework.
• Experience with cloud environments, especially AWS.
• Demonstrated experience building and maintaining highly available, distributed systems.
• Experience managing a team of 5‑10 engineers.

Required skills

• Java
• Spring Framework
• AWS
• Python
• Kubernetes
• Temporal or Cadence workflow engines
• Cassandra
• TiDB