Staff Backend Engineer

Overview

Staff Backend Engineer for Coupang’s Tier-1 Fulfillment Optimization systems that plan, distribute, and fulfill orders in real time.

What you'll do

• Design and build scalable, reliable services for real-time order planning, fulfillment optimization, inventory allocation, and network cost management.
• Own architecture across distributed systems using gRPC service meshes, Kafka pipelines, CPLEX optimization solvers, and multi-layer caching.
• Write and review production code in Kotlin and Java with an emphasis on correctness, performance, and operational safety.
• Lead design and code reviews to find correctness, scalability, and operational risks in latency-sensitive flows.
• Drive reliability through circuit breakers, graceful degradation, observability, and incident prevention.
• Collaborate with Product, Data Science, and Operations to translate fulfillment optimization goals into execution.
• Mentor engineers and establish scalable technical mechanisms like pipeline patterns and adapter abstractions.

What you'll need

• 10+ years of experience designing and operating high-scale distributed systems with strict latency and reliability requirements.
• Strong hands-on backend coding ability in Kotlin or Java.
• Deep system design knowledge covering API design, concurrency, data modeling, caching, and service communication (gRPC/REST).
• Strong code review skills for correctness, performance, and reliability issues.
• Experience with production-grade systems handling high QPS, large data volumes, or Tier-1 SLAs.
• Experience with event-driven architectures using Kafka at scale.
• Experience with resilience engineering such as circuit breakers, retry strategies, load testing, capacity planning, and graceful degradation.

Details

• Location: Bengaluru.
• Work model: Hybrid.