Job Description

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?" Born out of an obsession to make shopping, eating, and living easier than ever, we are collectively disrupting the multi-billion-dollar commerce industry from the ground up and establishing an unparalleled reputation for being leading 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 at since our inception. We are all entrepreneurial 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:

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 :

At least 10 years of professional software development experience 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).

Type of Work Model

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Hybrid - 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

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Those eligible for employment protection (recipients of veteran's benefits, the disabled, etc.) may receive preferential treatment for employment in accordance with applicable laws.

Privacy Notice

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Your personal information will be collected and managed by Coupang as stated in the Application Privacy Notice located below: https://www.coupang.jobs/privacy-policy/

Equal Opportunities for All :

Coupang is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to equal opportunity regardless of color, ancestry, religion, sex, nation origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status. Our unprecedented success could not be possible without the valuable inputs of our globally diverse team.