Senior Staff Engineer, Rocket Growth

Senior Staff Engineer, Rocket Growth Engineering Location: Seoul, Korea 

About Us

We are leaders in last-mile delivery. We own the delivery process end-to-end, all the way to your doorstep, with our own fulfillment centers, trucks, and drivers. We operate the largest directly employed delivery fleet in Korea, and utilize our own proprietary software and custom-designed trucks. Our technology leverages machine learning to anticipate demand and forward deploy the inventory closer to customers for fast delivery nationwide. Our technology predicts and assigns the fastest and most efficient path for every order out of hundreds of millions of combinations of inventory, processing truck, and route options within seconds of the order being placed. Our operational infrastructure spans 40 million square feet and housing millions of products. This translates into 70% of the Korean population living within 7 miles of a Coupang logistics center. We added 15 million square feet of infrastructure in 2021, more than the infrastructure added in the preceding two years combined.

Today, millions of customers enjoy Dawn Delivery and Same-Day Delivery shipping options, free unlimited returns for 30 days, and Rocket Fresh groceries. Since its launch, Rocket Fresh has grown to become the leading nationwide online grocer. We also launched the largest purely logistics food delivery service in Korea with Coupang Eats, which leverages, in part, the technology and infrastructure that we built for Rocket Delivery. We believe the success of programs like Rocket Fresh and Coupang Eats demonstrates the power of our network to extend new offerings to our loyal customers.

In 2022, Coupang launched its core Rocket Delivery business in Taiwan, offering customers next day cross-border delivery on millions of items available in Korea. These are the types of transformative innovations and “wow” experiences we aim to create for our customers, day in and day out. Coupang is a global company and we are committed to hiring and developing the best talent from Korea, Taiwan and around the world. Currently we have offices in Seoul, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Mountain View, Seattle, Riverside, Taipei, and Singapore.

Rocket Growth

Rocket Growth is a Coupang Fulfillment business that enables sellers to offer best-in-class delivery and post purchase experience to their customers. With Rocket Growth, sellers’ products are designated Coupang’s Jet Delivery badge and are delivered to customers via our world-class Rocket delivery network.

Rocket Growth is the fastest growing team in Coupang and has an exciting roadmap of product and features in the pipeline. We are hiring driven leaders who are excited to solve tough problems and enjoy collaborating with brilliant individuals to innovate and create history. 

Job Overview and Focus areas

Coupang is seeking a Senior Staff Engineer to provide technical direction for Rocket Growth. We are looking for an experienced and passionate engineering leader that can drive direction on technology, successfully align with other tech leaders and stakeholders, influence and build trust with teams, and execute delivery of complex systems considering scalability, future extensibility, and reliability. This has a particular focus on creating industry-leading, frictionless seller experiences for our fast-growing Merchant community.

Against the backdrop of a rapidly scaling business, this technical expert will help Coupang drive a step change in stability and scalability as it drives significant increases in capacity. Uniquely, there is an opportunity to build new technologies that go well beyond existing industry standards. S/he will therefore provide “hands-on” technical leadership to solve complex problems while making sound architecture and design trade-offs that balance strategic and tactical plans. S/he will establish technical standards, methodologies and engineering best practices that drive engineering excellence and quality throughout the entire product lifecycle.

The Senior Staff Engineer will provide technical direction, coaching and mentorship to a large, distributed team of full-stack engineers in Seoul and Seattle.

Key Responsibilities

Responsibilities will include, but not be limited to, the following:

• Lead and drive architecture design of Rocket Growth’s systems for scale, future extensibility, and reliability;

• Envision and drive alignment with stakeholders of the appropriate roadmap and future direction of technology for RG;

• Navigate and alleviate technical obstacles and blockers at the organizational level;

• Decompose complex problems into simple, straightforward solutions, providing

  mechanisms for the teams to prioritize ruthlessly and “move with urgency”; 

• Successfully champion collaboration and influence with tech leaders both within RG and other Coupang engineering organizations;

• Deep dive to uncover how teams can work with higher efficiency;

• Write code when necessary to lead by example and help with high priority projects;

• Proactively identify opportunities in both business and technology;

• Review, advise, and carry out the adoption of new technology (both open-source and commercial) that are useful in achieving business objectives;

• Recruit and develop world-class engineering talent.

Key Experience

• 10+ years of experience in software development at technology companies

• Solid track record of delivering large and complex systems with significant business

  impact

• Experience of designing and developing large-scale distributed systems and architectures

• 10+ years of experience in developing and operating backend services and web applications

• Broad and deep understanding of key technologies in storage, data processing, and serving

• Excellent communications and collaborations across teams and across functionalities

• Capable of object-oriented design and development

• Strong familiarity developing with Java and the Spring Framework

• Service development and operational experience in an AWS environment

• Experience driving improvements in code quality

• Experience using ORM such as JPA, Hibernate, and domain modeling

• Experience with logistics-related service development

• Experience in automating build/test/deploy

• Experience with bulk data processing using NoSQL solutions

• Experience with Git system for version control

• Experience with relational and column-oriented databases

• Agile experience