Senior Director of Software Engineering (Storage Solutions)

Coupang operates a diverse portfolio of databases, caching, messaging, and storage technologies that power customer-critical services at a massive scale. We are seeking a Senior Director, Storage Solutions to simplify and modernize this landscape into a reliable, secure, cost-efficient, and self-service platform. This leader will own the strategy for database and storage consolidation, managed stateful services, Cougar automation, regional resilience, backup and recovery, schema governance, capacity, and operational excellence. The mission is to remove database operations from domain teams and provide standardized, platform-managed stateful services by default. We are looking for a visionary, industry-recognized storage platform leader who has previously built and scaled managed database or storage systems supporting mission-critical workloads at a leading global technology company.Key ResponsibilitiesDrive the NewSQL Vision: Lead the strategic initiative to evaluate, select, and seamlessly migrate Coupang’s disparate database systems (MySQL, Cassandra, DocumentDB, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL) into a unified NewSQL ecosystem.Unify the Data Layer: Simplify our architecture, eliminate data silos, and drastically reduce operational overhead by deprecating legacy data stores in favor of a modern, horizontally scalable, ACID-compliant database architecture.Core Systems Engineering: Roll up your sleeves with principal engineers to debug kernel-level DB issues, optimize distributed consensus protocols (Paxos/Raft), and tailor the underlying NewSQL engine to Coupang’s hyper-scale requirements.Cross-Functional Alignment: Partner with VPs and Directors across E-commerce, Logistics, and Fintech engineering to ensure the new database architecture meets the strict latency, throughput, and reliability constraints of all business domains.Talent Leadership & OrganizationBuild a World-Class Team: Recruit, mentor, and retain a high-performing organization of deep-systems engineers, database kernel developers, and distributed systems architects.Engineering Culture: Foster a culture of technical excellence, rigorous peer review, and deep mechanical sympathy. Move the organization from a "database administration" mindset to a "database systems engineering" mindset.Organizational Scaling: Design the organizational structure for the data platform team, establishing clear scopes, KPIs, and career growth tracks for senior staff and principal engineers.Technical Leadership & ArchitectureArchitectural Design: Design the migration blueprint to transition heterogeneous data models (document, wide-column, relational) into a unified distributed SQL model without compromising performance or availability.Zero-Downtime Migrations: Pioneer safe, high-volume data migration strategies that allow live applications to transition from legacy data stores to the new architecture with zero downtime and strict data consistency guarantees.Deep Customization: Leverage your background as a database contributor to optimize the NewSQL open-source or vendor codebase. You will guide your team to commit patches upstream, tune storage engines (e.g., RocksDB), and optimize query planners for Coupang’s specific workloads.Execution and ImpactOperational Excellence: Deliver a highly resilient data layer with 99.999% availability, driving down Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) and minimizing blast radiuses.Cost & Efficiency: Significantly reduce our cloud infrastructure footprint and licensing costs by consolidating hardware and deprecating overlapping datastores.Developer Velocity: Drastically improve the productivity of thousands of Coupang software engineers by providing them with a single, predictable, and fully managed data persistence API, eliminating the need for them to learn multiple database paradigms.Essential QualificationsDeep Contributor Experience: You have hands-on experience contributing to the code of modern distributed relational/NewSQL databases (e.g., Google Spanner, TiDB/PingCAP, CockroachDB, YugabyteDB). You are intimately familiar with distributed transaction protocols, query optimizers, and storage engines.Experience with Spanner, TiDB, Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Vitess, Cassandra, DynamoDB, Kafka, Redis, or similar technologies.Experience building database-as-a-service or internal managed stateful platforms.Experience with multi-region active-active systems, data residency, or cross-cloud storage strategies.Extensive Experience: 10+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience, with at least 5+ years in a senior leadership/management role overseeing large engineering organizations (Directors, Managers, and Principal Engineers).Scale: Proven track record of operating, scaling, and migrating databases in high-throughput, tier-1 internet-scale environments.Domain Expertise: Deep understanding of the internals of both legacy relational DBs (MySQL, Postgres) and NoSQL stores (Cassandra, DynamoDB), giving you the necessary context to map out the consolidation strategy.Education: Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related highly technical field.