Staff Software Engineer (Search)

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 e-commerce 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

This is a critical role to Search & Discovery organization. You will build a world-class indexing platform to power mission critical features such as search, recommendation, and personalization. The team is responsible for developing the platform and the data pipelines for generating all the source data needed to power Coupang search, including both the ground truth data and ranking signals/ML features. You will identify and solve hard problems to improve the system scalability, enhance the reliability, as well as optimize the resource efficiency. 

This is a critical role to Search & Discovery organization. You will build a world-class indexing platform to power mission critical features such as search, recommendation, and personalization. The team is responsible for developing the platform and the data pipelines for generating all the source data needed to power Coupang search, including both the ground truth data and ranking signals/ML features. You will identify and solve hard problems to improve the system scalability, enhance the reliability, as well as optimize the resource efficiency.

What You Will Do

• Build a world-class indexing platform that powers most search verticals within Coupang and critical features like search, recommendation and personalization
• Proactively drive the execution of end-to-end data platform, data quality roadmap for Search & Discovery ML efforts
• Develop and scale data infrastructure that powers batch and real-time data processing, monitoring, and debugging for ML experiments
• Build strong cross-functional partnerships with Data Scientists, Analysts, Product Managers, Search Infra Engineers, Ranking Engineers and Data Platform Engineers to understand both the offline and online needs and deliver on those needs
• Research, analyze and select technical approaches for solving difficult and challenging development and integration problems, coach and mentor other engineers in process and methodologies

Basic Qualifications

• BS or MS degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 6+ years of experience
• Computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, performance complexity, and implications of computer architecture on software performance (e.g., I/O and memory tuning)
• Experience with Big Data tools and ETL frameworks (Hadoop, Hive, Presto, Spark, Spark Streaming, Apache Airflow, etc.)
• Experience with deploying highly robust and scalable data pipelines processing petabytes of data
• Experience in managing mission critical services with high throughput and low latency
• Experience with integrating applications and platforms with cloud technologies (i.e, AWS and GCP)
• Strong verbal and written communication skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with open-source enterprise-search platforms such as Apache Solr
• Experience with NoSQL databases such as Cassandra and HBase
• Experience with data interchange formats such as FlatBuffers and Protocol Buffers
• Experience with machine learning platform for search & discovery related rankings and ML frameworks such as Tensorflow and Pytorch is a strong plus

Pay & Benefits   

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. At Coupang, your base pay is one part of your total compensation.  

The base pay for this position ranges from $142,000/year in our lowest geographic m