Sr. Director, Back-End Engineering
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.