Staff Backend Engineer (Application Infra)

Coupand•Seattle, WA

15h•Hybrid

About The Position

As part of our Application Infrastructure org, this is a greenfield team that will impact complex Coupang workflow systems. We need to create a set of systems that will allow rapid workflow development for hundreds of domain teams, allowing critical infrastructure like rocket delivery service. It is a highly visible system with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue flowing through the systems. It is a chance to design from scratch, and create a reliable workflow service at scale. We are looking for a visionary Staff Software Engineer to lead the architectural design and implementation of our next-generation durable execution platform. This team is tasked with building a highly scalable, fault-tolerant system from scratch that enables developers to write long-running, reliable workflows as code. At Coupang, we Aim High and Find a Way to solve impossible problems. You will be responsible for building a system that doesn't just meet industry standards but sets them, ensuring 5-6 nines availability while leveraging AI to automate complex system behaviors and self-healing capabilities.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in computer science, Electrical Engineering, Math, or a closely related field
6 years of experience in backend software development
Proficiency in Java and the Spring Framework
Experience working in cloud environments, particularly AWS
Demonstrated experience in building and maintaining highly available, distributed systems

Nice To Haves

10+ years of professional software development experience, specifically building backend infrastructure that supports global-scale traffic.
Proven track record of managing and maintaining systems with 5-6 nines of availability.
Deep expertise in designing and deploying mission-critical systems (e.g., databases, messaging queues, or orchestration engines) from the ground up.
Expert-level proficiency in Java, Python with deep understanding of concurrency and memory management.
Experience or a strong architectural vision for using AI/ML to automate system-level functionality and operational tasks.
Deep familiarity with the Temporal or Cadence programming models and their underlying architecture.
Experience in Kubernetes and containerization.
Experience with Cassandra and TiDB preferred
Experience contributing to major open-source distributed systems projects.
Expertise in building highly observable systems using distributed tracing and advanced telemetry to proactively identify issues.

Responsibilities

Lead the end-to-end design of a distributed workflow engine.
Build the Best Team and Help Them Grow by setting the gold standard for architectural integrity and high-performance code.
Design for "5-6 nines" (99.9999% availability).
Dive Deep into the tail latencies and edge cases of distributed state management to ensure our platform is always on for our customers.
Integrate AI/ML models to automate system functionality, including predictive scaling, automated bottleneck detection, and intelligent error recovery, ensuring we Wow the Customer through seamless platform performance and availability.
Address challenges related to distributed locking, timers, and deterministic execution.
Be Data-Driven to validate architectural decisions against massive traffic patterns.
Influence without Authority, collaborating across the organization to ensure this platform becomes the backbone of our global operations.