Senior Staff Backend Engineer (Kubernetes Development) - Bengaluru

Coupang is seeking a highly experienced Senior Staff Backend Engineer specializing in Kubernetes to join our team in Bengaluru. This role is pivotal in designing, building, and optimizing our most critical, large-scale, and highly available systems using Go (Golang) and Kubernetes. You will drive architectural strategy, mentor senior engineering staff, and set the technical direction for cloud-native adoption and maturity across the organization.

What You Will Do:

• Define and evangelize the technical roadmap and long-term architecture for our core cloud-native platforms and services, ensuring adherence to best practices for reliability, performance, and security.
• Design, write, test, and deploy production-ready Golang code for critical components, APIs, and business logic, prioritizing low latency and high throughput.
• Lead the development and maintenance of our internal Kubernetes platform, including extending it with Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) and Operators for infrastructure automation.
• Establish and enforce standards for observability, monitoring, alerting, and logging using tools like Prometheus and Grafana, driving improvements in system reliability and operational efficiency.
• Act as a technical mentor to senior and mid-level engineers, enhancing engineering standards through design reviews, code reviews, and technical training.
• Collaborate closely with Security, DevOps, and Product teams to translate business requirements into robust, scalable technical designs.
• Serve as the final escalation point for production issues, performing deep-dive root cause analysis for performance and stability problems within the Kubernetes/Golang stack.

Basic Qualifications:

• Minimum of 13 years of progressive software engineering experience, with a strong focus on cloud-native application development and infrastructure.
• Deep, hands-on experience in designing, developing, and deploying high-performance, scalable microservices and distributed systems using Golang, including proficiency with concurrency patterns and best practices.
• Extensive experience with at least one major public cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Proven ability to define and implement complex microservices architectures considering fault tolerance, security, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Mastery of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools (e.g., Terraform) and deep experience in designing and optimizing CI/CD pipelines for Kubernetes deployments.
• Strong understanding of Kubernetes networking, service mesh technologies, and implementing robust monitoring, logging, and alerting.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring senior engineers, leading technical initiatives, and communicating complex technical concepts effectively.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Expert-level knowledge of Kubernetes internals, architecture, and advanced features.
• Experience managing and troubleshooting large-scale production Kubernetes clusters (e.g., EKS, AKS, GKE, or self-managed).
• Expertise in Kubernetes Operators, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and extending the Kubernetes API.
• Relevant certifications such as CKA, CKAD, or CKS.
• Experience with cloud-native data stores and streaming technologies deployed in Kubernetes.
• Experience implementing advanced security practices within Kubernetes environments.
• Hands-on experience implementing and managing GitOps workflows using tools like ArgoCD or Flux.