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The way engineers work at Coupang

minute read

Theo

The silent talent competition among IT companies to hire top-tier developers has been going on for some time now. Companies offer various benefits such as competitive salaries in the industry, flat organizational culture, state-of-the-art office, and growth potential. We met engineers that lead Coupang’s tech organizations and asked them to share the pros of working as an engineer at Coupang. 

Hi, could everyone first introduce what your roles are at Coupang?

Theo: Hi, my name is Theo from Coupang Eats. My team oversees listing stores, reviews, coupons, and taking orders through the Coupang Eats app as well as picking up food from the store and delivering it to customers. We own all the backend services except for the store and mobile-related side of the job. 

Justin: Hi, I'm Justin, Front Platform Team Software Development Manager (SDM). My team’s main job is to proactively oversee the API gateway for mobile devices and the status of each service more so than the business side through our monitoring platform. 

Allie: Hello, my name is Allie, and I'm a Software Development Manager (SDM). My team’s main responsibilities are related to order and cancellation services at Coupang. To elaborate, we support various types of order services and data on Coupang, such as orders placed through the Coupang app, subscription orders, pre-orders, and e-gifting in a reliable manner. 

What experiences did you have before joining Coupang?

Theo: Before joining Coupang, I worked on data analysis, backend jobs for search, spam filtering, API platform, cloud computing, and so on. 

After living in Jeju Island for a long time, I moved to Pangyo, where I experienced Rocket delivery for the first time. My order was delivered the day after I placed it. In Jeju, it usually took around 3-4 days without Coupang (laugh). When I was thinking Coupang has potential, I came across an opportunity and jumped right at it. 

Justin: I started my career developing electronic documents and a web version of office tools. Although the office web was interesting to work on with lots of technical challenges, I wanted to experience something new after seven years of being on the job. e-Commerce services were growing exponentially at the time and Coupang had one of the best customer services which is why I decided to join Coupang. 

Allie: Before joining Coupang, I did a range of SI projects for finance companies and public institutes. I found it exciting to be an engineer yet experience a variety of verticals. At the end of the day, I joined Coupang because my mentor who had been a guiding light for me started at Coupang first and put in a strong referral for me. Given how Coupang was a company that engineers dreamed of working for even back in the days, I was thrilled to be able to get on board. 

Justin, you had worked for Coupang for over 4 years, left for another company but returned to Coupang. Why did you choose ‘Coupang’ again?

Justin: I was attracted to Coupang for its unique leadership principles. Working for several years with these principles, I became accustomed to the byproduct of ease and efficiency resulting from it. Quickly achieving business goals along the way was a bonus. As time passed, I was more convinced that Coupang was bound to be successful. 

Justin

We'd like to hear about ongoing projects in each team.

Theo: We are upgrading the Coupang Eats service from a product perspective. The engineering team is focused on improving the architecture so that the end-to-end process from customer order to last-mile delivery is flawless even during service incidents. 

All Coupang services are implemented on MSA (microservice architecture) including Coupang Eats which is also made up of dozens of microservices. This is because while some of these services are essential for orders, many others may not necessarily be so. Our goal is to isolate as many services as possible from the customer’s order to deliver the experience to be incident-proof. 

Allie: We are currently leading a payment decoupling project which aims to successfully complete orders and start the delivery process even when the payment service is down. 

As one of Coupang’s core customer experiences is fast delivery, we are working on improving the service so that this experience is guaranteed even amidst a payment service failure. This project, which aims to isolate payment from the order process as the two are tightly coupled, has many challenges since there are dependencies with multiple teams. Nonetheless, the project is moving forward with the expectation that we'll be able to take our customer experience to the next level.

Allie

So, as an engineer in Korea’s leading IT company, Coupang, what’s the advantage of working here?

Justin: I think all the engineers at Coupang would point out global business opportunities, talents, and our culture. Some engineers seek work opportunities overseas, but I think Coupang is one of the few companies where you can get an equal level of experience in Korea. 

Theo: I think we have a culture in which you can constantly grow as an engineer. Most companies don’t distinguish between junior and senior engineers which makes it difficult to be fairly evaluated as a senior engineer. However, Coupang has levels befitting a set of competencies that entail relevant tasks and responsibilities. This allows engineers to be appraised accordingly.  

There’s also the opportunity to work with highly talented engineers coming from global companies. For instance, in our team, we have a fellow level engineer who is involved in our incident and architectural design reviews. We get to learn a lot during the process. 

Theo

Allie: I believe opportunities and challenges are most important for engineers. Coupang has been ahead of the game in terms of implementing MSA (microservice architecture) and developing AWS (Amazon Web Services) services. These experiences have enabled us to provide systematic and reliable platform services. Furthermore, we have continuously enhanced our services to ensure high availability and scalability while dealing with a large volume of traffic and data. 

Since we continue our development efforts to expand our business while also ensuring our services remain highly available, I am confident that Coupang is the most ideal IT company for engineers wanting to experience DevOps for a large-scale service that is based on a highly advanced platform.

We're curious about Coupang’s unique development culture. What kind of organizational culture are you trying to build as a tech leader?

Theo: I would say ‘poka yoke’ is one of Coupang’s quintessential cultures. Analyzing the root cause of an incident and find room for improvement happens across the board at any company. However, people are obsessed with this process and have a ruthless fixation on making things better at Coupang. Starting with customer symptoms, we ask ourselves ‘Why?’ at least five levels deep to fundamentally solve a problem. 

* Poka Yoke: Term referring to mechanisms to prevent mistakes by restricting actions for quality management purposes or forcing specific actions and thereby becoming fail-proof.

Justin: We proactively exchange feedback about our work. Plans are communicated to colleagues to receive feedback. Once jobs are completed, we also share performance test results before deployment to further solicit feedback. I’d like to build a team where we can mutually grow with the freedom to exchange feedback. 

Allie: One of Coupang’s symbolic development cultures that can’t go unmentioned is the fact that you get to work with engineers from around the globe. By collaborating with engineers not only from Korea but the US, China, and even Singapore, everyone can learn from each other and get inspired. ‘Only because this is Coupang,’ were we able to go on business trips together, participate in team-building activities, and always be involved before COVID days. 

As a tech organization leader, we are pouring efforts into fostering ‘Tech Talks’ which are aimed at members of the Product Engineering team. We’d like to instill a culture in which a range of project experiences, new technology, domain knowledge, and any other tech topics can be shared. The fact that our engineers in China and Korea can communicate about their expertise and experiences with the support of interpreters is also what makes Coupang’s development culture unlike any other.  

Allie

Coupang’s tech teams seem to have a dynamic culture as part of an engineering organization. What do you think are the advantages of Coupang as a ‘workplace’?

Justin: If I were to think of a word that describes Coupang, I’d say ‘growth’ would be the best fit. While I haven’t worked at many companies, I believe there are few companies where you can experience such accelerated growth. 

Theo: That’s right. I also think a fast-growing company beloved by its customers is one of the greatest qualities of Coupang. Whenever I meet people and talk about my job, they tell me ‘I’m always enjoying the service.’ Even people who never used our services before say, ‘I tried it and liked it,’ the next time we meet. 

Moreover, I think Coupang has its way of setting goals and approaching them. We come up with impossible goals and then think about what needs to be done to achieve them. Once we are aligned on the direction, all the members dive straight in towards that goal. I find this kind of work culture to be very different and a way to achieve greater goals. Therefore Coupang and Coupang Eats were able to demonstrate such unprecedented growth. 

Allie: Our flexible work environment is another benefit Coupang takes pride in. Even before the law enforcing a 52-hour limit per week was passed or before COVID, we had flexible work hours and once-a-week work from home policy in place. Such a mature corporate culture was the driver behind how work remained to go smooth as usual despite 90% of employees working remotely in the wake of the pandemic.

Thanks to the new Smart Office policy, we can work from either the Rocket Lab in Seonlleung or offices in Pangyo and Jamsil. Also, the newly opened ‘Coukids’ daycare center located at the Rocket Lab is a boon for employees who need reliable childcare while they’re working.

Coupang Coukids (Daycare)

As a senior in the industry, you may have advice for aspiring developers. What skills and experiences do developers need?

Theo: It's important to have a wide range of service experience. Solving problems for various domains or responding to different incidents while running systems all become a valuable experience for developers. Considering the traffic volume, I think Coupang is a company where developers can gain various service experiences. 

If you're job hunting, looking back on your work experience and figuring out your strengths can be useful. Many engineers don't highlight their strengths or how they can contribute by joining the team. The company can't help but see them as just another generic engineer. 

If you're unable to come up with any strengths even after trying, that means you need to think about what you want to be good at and work harder. If you're merely checking off a to-do list without clear goals, you'll fall way behind other engineers in a matter of years. 

Justin: Server developers with basic capabilities should be able to work for our team. Of course, it is also true that experience working with a large volume of traffic or achieving both productivity and quality goals by automating development and tests appears more attractive. 

I would like to advise junior engineers in the job market to ‘choose where you can learn rather than seek financial benefits at hand.’ Because financial returns corresponding to your competency will naturally follow. With that said, I recommend having a longer-term perspective and not feeling anxious. 

Justin

Finally, what are your goals as a member of Coupang’s tech team?

Allie: My goal is to continuously take on challenges and grow alongside colleagues while also enjoying working as a member of Coupang’s Tech team! 

Theo: For Coupang Eats, we aim to always maintain 99.99% availability. This translates to up to 1 hour of downtime over a year. You may think 1 hour is a lenient goal for basic web services like bulletin boards. However, given that we must track food orders being delivered to the customers in real-time before our job is complete, it’s quite a tall order. 

My goal as a team leader is to enable all members to build their expertise and work as a unified team. This is a significant challenge since our team is dispersed in Seoul and Shanghai, speak different languages and there are more than 15 of us. I want to become a manager that team members can trust and depend on. Since I am an engineer-turned-manager, I don’t want to become someone who understands what it takes to be a manager and do that job well.

Justin: If we were to achieve 100% uptime this year, I think such endeavors would pay off. Additionally, we are working on automating testing as a significant amount of QA efforts are required for every deployment. I have high expectations for achieving these goals and enhancing our work even further next year. 

It was a valuable time understanding Coupang’s culture in the eyes of three engineers. If you are interested in working at Coupang, please explore more opportunities on our career site.