Sr. Director, Back-End Engineering
The Senior Director of SRE will lead Coupang's company-wide reliability, resilience, and autonomous operations strategy. This role involves building platform mechanisms for service reliability, driving AI-assisted incident management, and managing large-scale engineering teams to ensure high availability across complex distributed systems.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Seoul, South Korea
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Backend
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 15+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, distributed systems, or site reliability engineering
- 8+ years leading large-scale, multi-layer engineering organizations
- Leadership experience in a best-in-class SRE, production engineering, or cloud operations organization at a hyperscaler or global technology company
- Experience with Kubernetes, service mesh, cloud-native platforms, traffic engineering, and large-scale capacity management
- Experience with chaos engineering, fault injection, regional resilience, and automated disaster recovery
- Experience building AI-assisted operations, incident intelligence, or self-healing systems
- Deep expertise in SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident management, and capacity planning
Full description
Sr. Director, Site Reliability Engineering
Coupang operates one of the largest and most complex technology platforms in the world. We are seeking a Senior Director, Site Reliability Engineering (Head of SRE) to define and lead company-wide reliability, resilience, scalability, and operational excellence. This leader will transform reliability from a collection of team-specific practices into platform mechanisms that services inherit by tier, while advancing incident response toward an intelligent, AI-assisted, and increasingly autonomous operating model. We are looking for a visionary, industry-recognized technology leader who has previously conceived, built, and scaled a comparable SRE, production engineering, resilience, or autonomous-operations organization at a leading global technology company. The successful candidate must combine deep technical credibility with the organizational leadership required to align executives, influence architecture across the company, and build a world-class leadership bench.
Key Responsibilities
- Set a bold, multi-year vision for company-wide reliability, resilience, and autonomous operations, and translate that vision into an executable roadmap with measurable business outcomes.
- Define and own the SRE strategy, operating model, engineering standards, and reliability governance across Coupang.
- Build platform mechanisms that allow services to inherit reliability requirements based on service tier rather than recreate them independently.
- Lead initiatives that materially improve availability, resilience, scalability, performance, and operational readiness.
- Partner with engineering, product, infrastructure, security, finance, and business leaders to align reliability investments with customer and business priorities.
- Own executive reliability metrics, including availability, detection and recovery performance, change risk, incident recurrence, capacity readiness, and operational toil.
- Build and scale a world-class SRE organization capable of influencing engineering practices across the company.
Reliability Strategy, SLOs & Engineering Governance
- Establish and evolve service-tier definitions, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, reliability scorecards, and objective certification mechanisms such as RBD/RBO.
- Create clear reliability requirements for Tier 0, Tier 1, and Tier 2 services, including redundancy, load testing, disaster recovery, observability, and incident response.
- Ensure reliability governance is embedded in architecture, development, release, and production operations rather than applied as a final review.
- Drive systematic reduction of recurring incidents, reliability risks, operational debt, and unsafe change patterns.