Sr. Director, Back-End Engineering
Coupang · Seoul
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.
- Influence company-wide architecture for graceful degradation, fault isolation, load shedding, circuit breaking, and failure containment.
Incident Management & Autonomous Operations
- Transform incident management into a fast, disciplined, data-driven, and increasingly autonomous operating model.
- Enable AI-assisted detection, event correlation, triage, escalation, root-cause drafting, remediation recommendations, and selected guardrailed auto-remediation.
- Improve incident command, on-call quality, escalation mechanisms, communication, post-incident learning, and corrective-action completion.
- Reduce noisy alerts, manual on-call work, repeated diagnosis, and time spent coordinating across fragmented systems.
- Use incident and telemetry data to continuously improve platform standards, testing, capacity models, and engineering roadmaps.
Disaster Recovery, Resilience & Capacity
- Own the strategy and execution model for disaster recovery, regional resilience, availability-zone loss, capacity-constrained recovery, and critical business continuity.
- Build reusable DR and failover mechanisms that services inherit from the platform rather than implement as bespoke projects.
- Establish objective RPO/RTO targets, automated readiness gates, regular game days, fault injection, and evidence-based recovery certification.
- Drive proactive and intelligent capacity management using forecasting, reservations, workload prioritization, and automated response to demand and failure scenarios.
- Partner with compute, traffic, networking, storage, and application leaders to enable safe zone evacuation, regional failover, and surge readiness.
Observability, Testing & Reliability Intelligence
- Partner with Observability and TestOps leaders to integrate logs, metrics, traces, continuous profiling, testing, and incident intelligence into one reliability feedback loop.
- Ensure every critical service has actionable telemetry, meaningful SLOs, release-quality signals, and production-readiness evidence.
- Use production incidents and operational patterns to drive targeted integration, load, resilience, and regression testing.
- Establish executive reliability dashboards that provide trusted views of service health, risk, capacity, and operational effectiveness.
Talent Leadership & Organization
- Lead multiple layers of SRE leaders, including senior managers, directors, principal engineers, and senior individual contributors.
- Own organizational design, global hiring strategy, leadership development, succession planning, and the creation of a strong leadership bench.
- Attract exceptional SRE, distributed systems, resilience, incident-management, and capacity-engineering talent from best-in-class technology organizations.
- Build an empowered organization with clear accountability, strong technical judgment, high execution velocity, and a company-wide perspective.
- Act as a force multiplier by mentoring technical and organizational leaders and raising reliability capabilities across engineering.
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Own reliability architecture decisions across large-scale distributed systems and cloud-native infrastructure.
- Define resilient patterns for redundancy, failover, traffic management, data recovery, workload prioritization, and dependency isolation.
- Guide architecture reviews and platform standards for safe scaling, fault tolerance, and operational simplicity.
- Balance availability, customer impact, engineering velocity, cost, and operational complexity in major technical decisions.
- Maintain sufficient technical depth to challenge assumptions, guide principal engineers, and make high-quality decisions during critical incidents.
Execution & Impact
- Deliver measurable improvements in availability, time to detect, time to mitigate, time to recover, incident recurrence, change-failure rate, and on-call burden.
- Create disciplined operating rhythms, milestones, ownership models, and quarterly targets for strategic reliability programs.
- Increase adoption of common reliability mechanisms and reduce team-specific implementations and manual operations.
- Demonstrate business impact through improved customer experience, reduced outage exposure, stronger peak readiness, and more efficient use of infrastructure capacity.
- Build credibility through predictable delivery, transparent risk management, and objective evidence of reliability improvement.
Essential Qualifications
- Leadership experience in a best-in-class SRE, production engineering, infrastructure reliability, or cloud operations organization at hyperscaler, major cloud provider, global marketplace, leading fintech, or similarly scaled technology company.
- Experience building an SRE practice comparable in maturity to leading industry organizations, rather than operating a traditional support or operations function renamed as SRE.
- 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, predictive reliability, or self-healing systems.
- 15+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, distributed systems, or site reliability engineering.
- 8+ years leading large-scale, multi-layer engineering organizations, including senior managers, directors, and senior individual contributors.
- Demonstrated experience personally defining the vision and leading the architecture, build-out, launch, and scaled adoption of a company-wide SRE, reliability, resilience, or autonomous-operations program.
- Prior experience building reliability systems and operating practices for high-scale, high-availability, customer-critical distributed systems.
- Deep expertise in SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident management, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and resilience engineering.
- Proven ability to lead through major incidents while also creating durable mechanisms that prevent recurrence.
- Recognized as a visionary technology and organizational leader who can influence executive stakeholders, align multiple engineering organizations, and attract exceptional talent.
- Proven ability to convert long-term strategy into measurable execution and company-wide adoption.