Director of Engineering, Fulfillment Optimization (Global Operations Technology)

Company Introduction

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’re collectively disrupting the multi-billion-dollar e-commerce industry from the ground up. We are one of the fastest-growing ecommerce companies that established an unparalleled reputation for being a dominant 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 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.

Job Overview

Fulfillment Optimization (FO) owns the systems that decide how every Coupang order is planned, distributed, and fulfilled. Our Tier-1 services sit on the critical path of every purchase decision and order across Korea and Taiwan. The platform has scaled to support Coupang's growth and requires continued investment in architecture, operational excellence, and team development to meet the next order of magnitude in scale, accuracy, and configurability. The FO platform comprises interconnected services that together handle the full fulfillment lifecycle -- from real-time order planning and cost optimization, through inventory management and warehouse orchestration, to simulation and workflow automation -- across a polyglot stack (Kotlin, Python, Java) serving Korea and Taiwan.

The Role

We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead Coupang's Fulfillment Optimization organization globally. You will own the technical vision, execution roadmap, and people leadership for the FO platform across Seoul and India. This role combines deep technical ownership of production-critical Tier-1 systems with the organizational leadership required to build, scale, and retain a high-performing engineering team across multiple geographies. You will partner closely with Product, Data Science, and Operations leadership to drive fulfillment optimization outcomes that directly impact customer experience, cost efficiency, and operational scalability across Korea and Taiwan.

Why This Role Matters

The leader in this role will directly influence how millions of orders are fulfilled every day. Every architectural decision — solver latency, pruning strategy, inventory consistency, network cost modeling — impacts customer trust, delivery speed, and operational cost across Coupang's entire ecommerce platform in Korea and Taiwan.

This is a rare opportunity to lead a platform organization at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, real-time optimization, and ecommerce fulfillment — with direct, measurable impact on Coupang's customer experience and bottom line. You will own both the technology and the team, with the autonomy to define the architecture, set the engineering culture, and build the organization that delivers it.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and drive architecture design of FO systems for scale, future extensibility, and reliability — setting the technical direction for order planning, fulfillment optimization, inventory allocation, and network cost management across all FO platform components.
• Envision and drive alignment with stakeholders on the appropriate roadmap and future direction of technology for Fulfillment Optimization — translating business objectives (PDD rationalization, CFCC consolidation, multi-market expansion, cost optimization) into technical execution plans.
• Navigate and alleviate technical obstacles and blockers at the organizational level — driving cross-team alignment across FO, Promise, WMS, Supply Chain, and Operations teams.
• Decompose complex problems into simple, straightforward solutions, providing mechanisms for the teams to prioritize ruthlessly and "move with urgency."
• Own the architecture, development, testing, deployment, and delivery of large-scale global software applications, systems, platforms, services, and technologies powering Coupang's fulfillment optimization across Korea and Taiwan.
• Drive reliability and operational excellence for mission-critical Tier-1 services — circuit breakers, graceful degradation, observability, capacity planning, and incident prevention for systems with strict P99 latency SLAs.
• Ensure high quality design reviews which meet business and architectural goals and drive critical feedback on architecture and design issues across distributed systems involving gRPC service meshes, Kafka event pipelines, CPLEX optimization solvers, and multi-layer caching.
• Build, mentor, and retain a high-performing engineering team across Seoul and India — hiring senior engineers and managers, developing engineers through career stages, establishing engineering culture, and creating an environment where top talent wants to stay and grow.
• Participate in strategic planning to achieve technical and business goals with team, leadership chain, and with customers — partnering with Product, Data Science, and Operations to translate fulfillment optimization goals into measurable outcomes.

Basic Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience working directly within engineering teams in a fast-moving environment.
• 10+ years of experience in developing and operating backend services and web applications.
• 7+ years of experience architecting and designing (architecture, design patterns, reliability, and scaling) of new and current systems.
• 5+ years of experience leading and managing engineering teams, including manager-of-managers experience, hiring, performance management, career development, and building team culture across multiple locations.
• Experience building complex, high-performance, and highly available distributed software systems with strict latency and reliability requirements (sub-100ms P99, 99.95%+ availability) that have been successfully delivered to customers.
• Strong technical depth in JVM backend systems (Java, Kotlin) — ability to review architecture, evaluate technical proposals, and make build-vs-buy-vs-migrate decisions.
• Extensive experience in managing mission critical Tier-1 services with high throughput and low latency — including circuit breakers, graceful degradation, observability, capacity planning, and incident management.
• Experience with event-driven architectures using Kafka at scale — stream processing, event sourcing, exactly-once semantics, consumer group management.
• Experience in system design — API design, domain modeling, data modeling, caching strategies (Redis, in-memory, S3-backed), messaging patterns, service-to-service communication (gRPC, REST).
• Experience in collaborating with cross-functional teams to define mission, vision, and roadmaps.
• Experience partnering with product, data science, and program management teams.
• Proven track record of managing distributed/remote engineering teams across time zones and geographies.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in ecommerce fulfillment, supply chain, logistics, order management, inventory management, warehouse management, or planning/optimization systems.
• Experience with optimization systems — solvers (CPLEX, Operations Research-Tools, Gurobi), decision engines, constraint programming, or data-science-integrated production systems.
• Platform modernization experience — migrating legacy systems to microservices, event-driven architectures, or domain-driven designs in production environments.
• Solid engineering skills as a technical leader to coach and lead high performing software engineers and keep them motivated.
• Excellent communication and analytical skills to shepherd communication with end users, technical and business teams to collect requirements, describe product features, and develop technical designs to achieve business goals.
• Knowledge of Agile software engineering practices and patterns for the full software development lifecycle including coding standards, code reviews, build processes, testing, and live site operations.
• Demonstrated leadership in cross-functional, highly collaborative environment.
• Track record of developing engineers through various career stages and building high-performance teams.
• Demonstrated focus on continuous improvement of systems, software, and processes through data analysis and metrics.
• Ability to independently operate and lead through ambiguity in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience with Agentic AI tools for development and code review — using AI-assisted coding agents (e.g., Cursor, Copilot, Devin, Claude Code) to accelerate development velocity, improve code review quality, and automate repetitive engineering tasks.
• Experience with Spec-Driven Development — defining system behavior through specifications (OpenAPI/Swagger, Protocol Buffers, API-first design, contract-first development) before implementation, ensuring well-defined contracts between services.
• Experience with multi-region systems — region-specific routing, data isolation, cross-border fulfillment, and per-market configuration management.

Recruitment Process and Others

Recruitment Process

• Application Review - Phone Interview - Onsite (or Virtual Onsite) Interview – Offer
• The exact nature of the recruitment process may vary according to the specific job and may be changed due to scheduling or other circumstances.
• Interview schedules and the results will be informed to the applicant via the e-mail address submitted at the application stage.

Details to Consider

• This job posting may be closed prior to the stated end date for application if all openings are filled.
• Coupang has the right to rescind an offer of employment if a candidate is found to have submitted false information as part of the application process.
• Those eligible for employment protection (recipients of veteran’s benefits, the disabled, etc.) may receive preferential treatment for employment in accordance with applicable laws.
• Job titles and responsibilities may be subject to change depending on the candidate’s overall experience, etc. This will be communicated to the candidate at the appropriate time before the offer.
• Hiring may be restricted in case the legal qualifications required for hiring and work performance is not met.
• This is a full-time regular position and includes 12 weeks of probation period; provided, however, the probationary period may be either skipped, shortened or extended if necessary for business purposes

Privacy Notice

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

Document Return Policy

1. This notification is given pursuant to Article 11 (6) of the Fair Hiring Procedure Act.
2. A job applicant, who has applied but not been finally selected for a position at Coupang (the “Company”), may request the Company to return his/her hiring documents submitted pursuant to the Fair Hiring Procedure Act. However, this will not apply where the hiring documents were submitted via the website of the Company or e-mail, or where the job applicant submitted those documents voluntarily without a request from the Company. In addition, if the hiring documents were destroyed due to a natural disaster or any other reasons not attributable to the Company, such documents will be deemed to have been returned to the job applicant.
3. A job applicant who wishes to request the return of his/her hiring documents pursuant to the main sentence of paragraph 2 above should fill out a “Request for Return of Hiring Documents” [Annex Form No. 3 in the Enforcement Rule of the Fair Hiring Procedure Act] and submit It by email (recruitingops@coupang.com). In such case, within fourteen (14) days from the date of identifying the receipt of the request, the Company will send the hiring documents to the job applicant’s designated address via registered mail. Please be informed that the job applicant is required to pay the postage on the registered mail.
4. In preparation for a job applicant’s request for the return of hiring documents pursuant to the main sentence of paragraph 2 above, the Company shall retain the original hiring documents submitted by the job applicant for 180 days from the completion of the recruiting process. If no request is made until the end of this period, all his/her hiring documents will be destroyed immediately in accordance with the Personal Information Protection Act.
5. The above paragraphs 1 - 4 shall only apply when the labor-related laws of Korea govern the application. They are otherwise not applicable.