Earlier this year, Coupang was named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies — a recognition that reflects Coupang’s relentless drive to redefine commerce through speed, technology, and customer-centricity. One of the most critical drivers behind this success is Fulfillment Optimization which plays a central role in delivering on Coupang’s promise to wow each customer. While expectations for delivery speed and service quality continue to rise, the ability to innovate at the system level sets true leaders apart. Fulfillment Optimization is at the heart of this innovation, enabling Coupang to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
(Seoul team)
Reimagining fulfillment at scale
Fulfillment Optimization is central to Coupang’s mission of wowing each customer by providing exceedingly fast shipping speeds, and dynamically routing orders using cutting-edge software systems that blend state-of-the-art operations research techniques with tried-and-true methods to lower costs for our customers.
Through the Fulfillment Optimization initiative, the distribution and fulfillment of millions of orders to over 100 fulfillment centers was reimagined. For every single order, thousands of fulfillment paths are evaluated that keep the promise made to customers while minimizing the total cost of fulfillment. The savings are generated from better utilization of automation assets or low-cost-yielding assets.
Dynamic, real-time decisions
The cost of various aspects of the fulfillment journey is dynamic. The Fulfillment Optimization team built advanced software systems to provide the latest state information relating to fulfillment center capacity, transportation capacity, inventory of millions of items, and the status of various automation technologies such as AGV (Autonomous Guided Vehicles), auto carton erectors, auto labelers, and auto bagger packing stations across the fulfillment network.
(An Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) robot)
Engineering a smarter fulfillment system
The new software systems developed for this initiative include a distributed in-house Network Graph Manager built on a NoSQL DB with in-house graph modeling, a plan orchestrator layer that facilitates stream and batch planning of customer orders, and a Stream Planner Solver in Python. These systems run cutting-edge operations research models to optimize the total cost of fulfillment for every single order.
Cross-functional collaboration for system design
During the development journey, the Fulfillment Optimization team partnered with Fulfillment Center Operations, Transportation Operations, Operations Design Excellence, Finance, and Product teams to identify various aspects of the fulfillment journey, their costs, and the factors that influence them. This helped guide the design, architecture, and engineering of systems to ensure fast deliveries at the lowest cost.
(Seattle team)
Digital twin for seamless rollouts
When reimagining the distribution and fulfillment of millions of orders to over 100 unique fulfillment centers, minimizing disruptions and staying true to our principle ‘WOW the Customer’ was important. Hence, as part of Fulfillment Optimization, we architected a digital twin simulation system that consumes the real-time production orders in a shadow environment and plans the order, with capabilities to visually compare the production output vs the shadow plan output and make decisions to promote the shadow models to production. This ensured a smooth transition and rollout of our new systems.
Looking ahead
Fulfillment Optimization is expected to evolve to incorporate more and more components of the fulfillment network such as item inventory, forecasts, automation asset capacities, logistics network state, truck availability, and more. The ultimate goal is to implement all aspects of fulfillment in software and continuously reduce the total cost.
Innovation that inspires and empowers
Being recognized by Fast Company underscores the deep commitment to innovation and excellence that drives Coupang’s success. Fulfillment Optimization exemplifies how cutting-edge technology and cross-functional collaboration come together to solve complex challenges and deliver outstanding results.
For those who thrive in fast-paced environments and are passionate about pushing the boundaries of what technology can achieve, Coupang offers a unique opportunity to be part of a visionary team that is building the future of commerce.
Employee stories |
In 2022, Coupang filed the most patent applications in our history, offering customers even greater wow experiences through new technology. To celebrate our innovative employees, we held the Inventors Meetup on March 16 at our Rocket Lab in Seoul.
Employee stories |
Following Coupang’s recognition as one of the Most Innovative Company for 2025 by Fast Company, we are proud to highlight the teams driving this innovation forward. In the first article of the series, we feature the AI & Knowledge Engineering team.
Employee stories |
Rahul’s journey at Coupang India Dev Center exemplifies the impact of innovation and engineering excellence in Fulfillment Technology. Meet Rahul and discover how his work is building the future of commerce at Coupang.