Staff Back-end Engineer at Coupang in Seattle, USA
- Company: Coupang
- Location: Seattle, USA
- Posted: Sep 21, 2026
- Type: Full-time
- Salary: $152,000/year to $261,000/year
- Experience: 7+ years
- Visa sponsorship available
Overview
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 enviro…
Job description
- 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.
Responsibilities
- Design and implement systems that meet the needs of our growing business.
- Direct ownership of new features aimed at enhancing the scalability, reliability, availability, extensibility, and performance of our platform.
- Collaborate with a team of smart and passionate engineers.
- Delight customers while building high-quality software.
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.
- 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.
Skills
Required
- Back-end development
- Large-scale distributed systems
- Microservices architectures
- High-throughput, low-latency systems
- SLAs/SLOs
- Go, Java, Python, C++, or Rust
- Relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL)
- API standards (REST, gRPC, GraphQL)
- Kubernetes
- CI/CD pipelines
Preferred
- Event-driven architectures
- Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pulsar
- Zero-downtime database migrations
- Legacy system modernization
- Infrastructure cost-optimization
- Observability
- Distributed tracing
- OpenTelemetry
Benefits
- Medical/Dental/Vision/Life, AD&D insurance
- Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) & Health Savings Account (HSA)
- Long-term/Short-term Disability
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP) program
- 401K Plan with Company Match
- 18-21 days of the Paid Time Off (PTO) a year based on the tenure
- 12 Public Holidays
- Paid Parental leave
- Pre-tax commuter benefits
- MTV - [Free] Electric Car Charging Station
- Our compensation reflects the cost of living 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 $152,000/year in our lowest geographic market to $261,000/year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on several factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
- “Other Compensation” includes, but is not limited to, bonuses, equity, or other forms of compensation that would be offered to the hired applicant in addition to their established salary range or wage scale.
About Coupang
We exist to wow our customers. We know we’re doing the right thing when we hear our customers say, “How did I ever live without Coupang?” Born out of an obsession to make shopping, eating, and living easier than ever, we are collectively disrupting the multi-billion-dollar commerce industry from the ground up and establishing an unparalleled reputation for being leading 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 entrepreneurs 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.