Senior Staff, Machine Learning Engineer (Coupang Eats Search)
CoupangAbout the role
About us
Coupang Eats is creating new experiences that make everyday life more convenient for customers by expanding its services beyond food delivery into grocery and retail shopping. Driven by a constant commitment to delivering a better customer experience, we continue to challenge ourselves and lead innovation across new services and categories.
Coupang Eats empowers employees who create opportunities and deliver results by giving them greater roles and responsibilities. Here, you can turn your ideas into action, create even greater opportunities through your achievements, and experience the fulfillment of directly driving business growth.
If you want to grow alongside experts in their respective fields and take on even greater challenges together, join Coupang Eats today.
About the Role
Lead ML innovations on Retrieval and Relevance for Coupang Eats Search, one of Asia’s fastest-growing commerce businesses. You will shape how customers discover brands, stores, dishes, and products across food delivery and quick commerce, owning the machine learning models and strategies behind retrieval and relevance. As the ML Lead for Coupang Eats Search, you will be accountable for increasing successful retrieval of brands, stores, dishes, and products, and for driving measurable improvements in relevance and conversion. You will own the end-to-end stack, including query and menu understanding, candidate retrieval, relevance, and quality evaluation. You will establish a multi-year roadmap and lead projects across machine learning and engineering. Food-delivery search is dynamic, hyperlocal, and time-sensitive. Results must reflect customer intent while adapting to location, restaurant and menu availability, delivery time, price, promotions, quality, and real-time customer context. The ideal candidate combines deep search and NLP expertise with strong product judgment and organizational leadership, and can balance quality, latency, reliability, and experimentation velocity.
What You Will Do (Key Responsibilities)
- Customer and Business Outcomes: Own the machine learning strategy, metrics, and execution for improving brand, store, dish, and product retrieval and increasing conversion across Coupang Eats Search surfaces. Establish clear outcome metrics and targets and use rigorous experimentation and diagnostics to deliver sustained improvements while protecting key guardrail metrics and customer experience.
- Query and Product Understanding: improve query intent and entity understanding, menu and restaurant representation, typo tolerance, synonym expansion, and query rewriting.
- Retrieval: Advance lexical, semantic, and hybrid retrieval. design scalable, low-latency retrieval strategies, including indexing, feature pipelines, model life cycle.
- Relevance Measurement and Experimentation: Establish a rigorous quality framework using offline evaluation, human judgments, online experiments, guardrail metrics, and diagnostics for tail queries, cold-start cases, and customer segments.
- ML and LLM Innovation: Apply modern machine learning, embeddings, and LLMs to query and menu understanding, candidate generation, labeling, evaluation, and defect analysis, with clear customer impact and cost discipline.
- Multi-Market and Localization: Build reusable capabilities while adapting language understanding, cuisine taxonomies, customer preferences, and marketplace signals to the needs of each market.
- Organization Leadership: coach machine learning engineers, infra engineers, and work with data analysts to build a world-class Coupang Eats Search experience.
What We are Looking for
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years in search, information retrieval, NLP
- Deep expertise in product understanding, retrieval, relevance, and modern LLM techniques.
- Proven delivery of large-scale consumer Search systems with measurable customer and business impact.
- Experience in designing retrieval methods for distributed, low-latency systems at scale with relevance guarantee.
- Masters or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related technical fields.
Preferred Qualifications
- Food delivery, local commerce, e-commerce, advertising experience.
- Hyperlocal, time-sensitive ranking using location, availability, delivery time, price, and pro
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