Sr. Staff Engineer

Senior Staff Engineer – Gateway Services  

The Gateway Services team is responsible for building Coupang’s traffic infrastructure layer using Service Mesh. Key aspects of the infrastructure layer include service discovery, load balancing, traffic resiliency, traffic management, failure recovery, and observability paradigms. The job position entails the following: 

• Develop and implement enterprise-wide fine-grained traffic control using state-of-the-art technologies (Istio/Envoy, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, SPIFFE) 

• Partner for success with cross-functional teams both within the platform organization and with the stakeholder teams to drive results. 

• Be an evangelist and thought leader espousing the principles and benefits of traffic management for the wider benefit of the company.

 

We are looking for a [Senior Staff Engineer]/[Staff Engineer] who has a deep understanding of the interplay of large scale microservices and hands-on experience with Service Mesh. You will be responsible for designing the architecture and driving the team to deliver a modern platform that powers the entirety of Coupang’s services. 

Job Description 

As a [Senior Staff Software Engineer]/[Staff Software Engineer] in the Gateway Services team, you will partner with leaders of multiple Platform teams. You will implement seamless solutions to complex infrastructure problems, building a highly scalable, reliable, and efficient platform for our customers. You will be accountable for raising the bar on engineering and operational excellence. In this role, you will: 

• Build Service Mesh components collaborating actively within a small, highly talented team. 

• Design and implement infrastructure components related to traffic management using Rust/C++/Go. 

• Architect workload and service management infrastructure by designing and developing critical infrastructure components. 

• Decompose complex problems into simple, straightforward solutions following Coupang's leadership principles "Move with Urgency" and "Ruthless Prioritization". 

• Demonstrate excellence resulting in scalable systems and services with the highest quality architecture and design. 

• Dive deep into critical system issues, proactively addressing similar root causes, and raising the bar on Operational Excellence. 

• Collaborate with other Coupang technical leaders to make the service extensible and unlock opportunities for innovations.

 

Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related technical field. 

• [12+]/[8+] years of professional software development experience with at least 2+ years of experience as a Technical Lead. 

• Experience in designing and implementing traffic management solutions to handle requests at scale. 

• Hands-on experience in designing and developing large scale distributed systems, at least the past three years. 

• Strong experience in designing and implementing Service Mesh (Istio) features. 

• Excellent development skills in Go/Rust/C++ with a proven track record of delivering mission critical systems. 

• Experience with cloud computing using AWS or Azure or GCP.

 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Deep understanding of network components (virtual networks, route tables, subnets, and gateways). 

• Deep understanding of modern web applications design architecture and API design patterns with high performance and scale. 

• Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment and lead the delivery of large-scale services for complex business offerings.