Senior Back-end Engineer

Company Introduction

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 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.

Coupang Intelligence Cloud (CIC) builds and operates the compute platform powering Coupang's AI/ML and large‑scale workloads. We are now extending the platform from serverless container‑based workload support to virtualization. We are building a VM offering on top of KVM with a tuned Linux kernel. We leverage hardware and software assisted virtualization to get baremetal‑like performance within our VMs. We are building a OVN/OVS‑based SDN that can be offloaded to the DPU.

We are looking for a senior technical leader to drive it.

As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will own the hypervisor, host kernel, and DPU layers of our multi‑tenant VM platform. You will architect the QEMU‑KVM stack, use Nvidia‑DOCA for virtualization, design the SDN data plane using OVS and OVN, lead the GPU passthrough strategy for GPU and Infiniband, including NVSwitch and Shared NVLink topologies. You will be partnering closely with engineering leadership in the US, Korea, and China.

This is a hands‑on individual contributor role with significant technical scope and the opportunity to shape the architecture from the ground up.

• Own the hypervisor stack end‑to‑end — QEMU‑KVM, libvirt, host kernel, and design such that the virtualization logic can be entirely offloaded to the DPU.
• Drive Linux kernel strategy for hypervisor hosts — kernel version selection, custom patches, KVM/vfio/vhost subsystem tuning, scheduler and memory tuning for VM workloads, backporting fixes, and contributing patches upstream.
• Debug and resolve issues across the full virtualization stack — guest, QEMU, KVM, host kernel, and hardware — including performance regressions, livelock, and corner cases that surface only at fleet scale.
• Architect and own the multi‑tenant VM and Bare Metal platform, including VM/Bare Metal lifecycle. Design and implement the SDN data plane using OVS and OVN — Open Flow pipeline design, VXLAN/Geneve tunneling, distributed routing, and per‑tenant network isolation.
• Lead the GPU virtualization strategy: SR‑IOV, PCIe passthrough, IOMMU/NUMA topology, and Shared NVLink via NVIDIA Fabric Manager on B200/GB300/RV200.
• Drive technical decisions across squads — write design docs, lead design review sessions, partner with networking, storage, and platform teams in the US, Korea, China, and India.
• Set the technical bar for code review, design, and operational excellence; mentor senior and staff engineers.
• Own production reliability for the virtualization platform — define SLOs, drive incident response, and meet a 99%+ availability target as the platform scales.

• 12+ years of systems software engineering experience, with at least 6 years focused on virtualization, hypervisors, and/or the Linux kernel.
• Deep, hands‑on expertise with QEMU‑KVM internals — virtio, vhost‑user, machine types, CPU topology, NUMA…