Director of Engineering, Fulfillment Optimization (Global Operations Technology)

About this role

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…