Staff Back-end Engineer

Coupang•Seattle, WA

About The Position

Rocket Growth is the 2P marketplace at Coupang. Coupang’s Rocket Growth team is dedicated to providing our customers with the best selection at the lowest prices while ensuring utmost convenience for our sellers. We are seeking a Staff Back-end Engineer to join our mission. In this fast-paced environment, you will collaborate with a team of smart and passionate engineers to design and implement systems that meet the needs of our growing business. You will have direct ownership of new features aimed at enhancing the scalability, reliability, availability, extensibility, and performance of our platform. We prioritize delighting customers while building high-quality software and seek candidates with a proven track record in designing and implementing large-scale distributed systems.

Requirements

7+ years of professional software development experience, with focused on large-scale back-end systems and microservices architectures.
Proven track record of designing, building, and operating high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems in production (handling strict SLAs/SLOs for availability and durability).
Deep technical mastery in at least one modern back-end language (e.g., Go, Java, Python, C++, or Rust) and strong proficiency with relational (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and non-relational databases (e.g., Cassandra, Redis, DynamoDB).
Demonstrated experience establishing architecture paradigms, API standards (REST, gRPC, GraphQL), and technical strategy across multiple engineering teams.
Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and modern CI/CD pipelines.

Nice To Haves

Expertise in event-driven architectures and distributed messaging platforms (e.g., Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pulsar).
Proven history of leading major technical turnarounds, such as zero-downtime database migrations, legacy system modernization, or major infrastructure cost-optimization initiatives.
Strong background in observability and reliability engineering (distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry, chaos engineering, incident management leadership).
History of active technical mentorship—successfully growing Senior (L5) engineers into Lead/Staff roles.

Responsibilities

Design and implement systems that meet the needs of our growing business.
Have direct ownership of new features aimed at enhancing the scalability, reliability, availability, extensibility, and performance of our platform.