Director - Backend Engineering (Infrastructure)

Coupang

Company Introduction  We exist to wow our customers. We know we’re doing the right thing when we hear our customers say, “How did I ever live without Coupang?” Born out of an obsession to make shopping, eating, and living easier than ever, we are collectively disrupting the multi-billion-dollar commerce industry from the ground up and establishing an unparalleled reputation for being leading 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.    Role Overview  The Identity, Access and Protection Infrastructure team builds the platform that secures all our services and customer interactions. We accelerate Coupang’s business through our industry-leading security platform, on which our developers can build amazing products. Our work spans many layers of the application stack – from cryptographic key management to service identity to user authentication and dynamic authorization – to achieve a modern Zero Trust architecture. We think beyond technologies and standards, to take a business-wide perspective We are seeking an engineering leader to lead our dynamic authorization effort. This team protects our customers by watching all API calls for risk indicators, triggering corrective actions when necessary. You will work with senior leaders and architects to drive strategy and execution in your area and collaborate with your peers on their areas as needed. You will model excellent communication, collaboration and execution within our team and the larger Technical Infrastructure organization. The successful candidate will be someone who can hire and retain the best, build an effective organization, work across groups to deliver broad business impact, and is not afraid to dive deep when needed. Come join us!  What You Will Do  In this role, you will:  * Help build a great team by hiring the best and actively shaping team culture.   * Drive the evolution of our platform by overseeing strategy, creating roadmaps, driving execution, and working for company-wide adoption.  * Drive alignment across key stakeholders on strategic roadmaps and deliverables.  * Partner with teams across the company to proactively identify business and technical opportunities.  * Drive execution through technical and organizational complexities, balancing strategic goals and immediate impact.   * Dive deep when necessary to lead by example and help with high priority projects.  * Contribute to the Coupang engineering community through cross-company initiatives.  * Inspire teams to raise the bar on design, development and Operational Excellence.    Basic Qualifications  * Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related technical field.   * 12+ years professional experience working in software engineering teams, or 10+ years’ experience with advanced degree.    * 5+ years’ experience managing engineers.   * Experience leading design and development of large scale distributed systems.   * Recent experience with security, IAM or related technologies.  * Experience in collaborating with cross-functional teams to define mission, vision, and roadmaps.   * Experience handling multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment and leading the delivery of large-scale services for complex business offerings.   Preferred Qualifications  * Masters or PhD degree in computer science or other related technical field.   * Hands-on experience building security protocols and/or systems.  * Experience in collaborating with cross-functional teams to define mission, vision, and roadmaps.   * Experience working with Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes, gRPC and Istio.    Recruitment Process   * Application Review -> Phone Interview -> Onsite (or Virtual Onsite) Interview –> Offer  * The exact nature of the recruitment process may vary according to the specific job and may be changed due to scheduling or other circumstances.  * Interview schedules and the results will be informed to the applicant via the e-mail address submitted at the application stage.    Details to Consider   * This job posting may be closed prior to the stated end date for application if all openings are filled.  * Coupang has the right to rescind an offer of employment if a candidate is found to have submitted false information as part of the application process.  * Those eligible for employment protection (recipients of veteran’s benefits, the disabled, etc.) may receive preferential treatment for employment in accordance with applicable laws.  * Job titles and responsibilities may be subject to change depending on the candidate’s overall experience, etc. This will be communicated to the candidate at the appropriate time before the offer.  * Hiring may be restricted in case the legal qualifications required for hiring and work performance is not met.    Privacy Notice   * Your personal information will be collected and managed by Coupang as stated in the Application Privacy Notice located below. https://www.coupang.jobs/privacy-policy

Coupang

Job Description: Director of Backend Engineering (AI Infrastructure)   Company Introduction We exist to wow our customers. We know we’re doing the right thing when we hear our customers say, “How did I ever live without Coupang?” Born out of an obsession to make shopping, eating, and living easier than ever, we are collectively disrupting the multi-billion-dollar commerce industry from the ground up and establishing an unparalleled reputation for being leading 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.   Role Overview We are seeking a visionary Director of Backend Engineering to lead the teams responsible for the software "brain" that manages our global AI Physical Infrastructure. You will oversee the development of the SDN orchestrators, automated fleet management systems, and the high-performance storage backends that power our AI training and inference clusters. Your mission is to abstract the complexity of specialized hardware (NVIDIA/HPC) into a seamless, automated, and hyper-reliable cloud platform.     Key Responsibilities   1. Strategic Leadership & Fleet Orchestration * Software-Defined Infrastructure: Lead the design and delivery of an SDN Orchestrator to automate complex GPU networking (InfiniBand/RoCE/NVLink) and core DC routing. * Fleet Health Automation: Oversee the development of backend services for GPU Health & Fault Detection, automating the lifecycle from burn-in and diagnostics to global RMA workflows. * Capacity & Traffic Engineering: Drive the backend logic for global traffic routing, load balancing (NGINX/Kong), and IPAM to ensure zero-bottleneck training environments. 2. Data & Storage Systems * HPC Data Pipelines: Collaborate with storage engineers to build backend interfaces for Parallel File Systems (Lustre, Weka, VAST etc.), ensuring high-throughput data delivery to compute nodes. * Storage Durability: Direct the backend strategy for AI Object Storage, focusing on high durability and low-latency retrieval for massive datasets. 3. Engineering Excellence * Scalable Architecture: Act as the final technical authority for AI Infra Architecture, ensuring systems are resilient, multi-region, and capable of sub-millisecond coordination. * DevOps & IaC Culture: Champion a "Hardware-as-Code" mindset, utilizing Python, Ansible, and Terraform to eliminate manual intervention in DC operations. 4. Team Development * Lead a multi-disciplinary org including Backend Developers, SDN Engineers, and Infra Ops teams, AI Infra Engineering * Establish 24/7 L1/L2/L3 operational standards to maintain > 99.99% availability of the AI fleet.   Required Qualifications * Experience: 15+ years in Backend Engineering, with at least 5 years in a leadership role managing complex infrastructure (Cloud, FinTech, or HPC). * Deep Infrastructure Knowledge: Proven experience with Linux internals, hardware-software interfaces (drivers/firmware), and distributed systems. * Networking Mastery: Solid understanding of L2/L3 networking, and ideally, specialized fabrics like InfiniBand or RoCE. * The Stack: Professional proficiency in Python, Go, or C++, and deep experience with Terraform, Kubernetes, and Ansible. * Large-Scale Data: Experience managing high-performance storage backends (GPFS, Lustre, or equivalent parallel systems). * Hardware Savvy: You don't just write code; you understand power envelopes, liquid cooling constraints, and GPU architecture (NVIDIA/HPE/Dell).   Preferred Skills * Experience building custom SDN controllers or orchestration layers from scratch. * Direct experience with NVIDIA or GPUDirect technologies. * Previous success in a "Hyper-scale" environment (AWS, Azure, GCP, Meta, AI Cloouds etc.).   Recruitment Process * Application Review - Phone Interview - Onsite (or Virtual Onsite) Interview – Offer The exact nature of the recruitment process may vary according to the specific job and may be changed due to scheduling or other circumstances. * Interview schedules and the results will be informed to the applicant via the e-mail address submitted at the application stage.   Details to Consider * This job posting may be closed prior to the stated end date for application if all openings are filled. * Coupang has the right to rescind an offer of employment if a candidate is found to have submitted false information as part of the application process. * Those eligible for employment protection (recipients of veteran’s benefits, the disabled, etc.) may receive preferential treatment for employment in accordance with applicable laws.   Privacy Notice Your personal information will be collected and managed by Coupang as stated in the Application Privacy Notice located below.   https://privacy.coupang.com/en/land/jobs/

Monzo

🚀 We’re on a mission to make money work for everyone. We’re waving goodbye to the complicated and confusing ways of traditional banking. After starting as a prepaid card, our product offering has grown a lot in the last 10 years in the UK. As well as personal and business bank accounts, we offer joint accounts, accounts for 16-17 year olds, a free kids account and credit cards in the UK, with more exciting things to come beyond. Our UK customers can also save, invest and combine their pensions with us.  With our hot coral cards and get-paid-early feature, combined with financial education on social media and our award winning customer service, we have a long history of creating magical moments for our customers! We’re not about selling products - we want to solve problems and change lives through Monzo ❤️ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   📍London or Remote (UK) | 💰 Base salary £170k - £225k + Equity + Benefits  Monzo is on a mission to build technology that connects the world. We are more than a platform; we are a global infrastructure that millions of people rely on for their daily lives, finances, and communication. This puts us in an incredibly unique position. We are the custodians of immense amounts of sensitive financial data as well as people’s money that are highly attractive to sophisticated adversaries and state-level actors. Monzo has always adopted a Secure by Design model. We believe that security is not a function, but is instead a fundamental property of high-quality engineering. We have a world-class team of software and security engineers who ensure our platform is inherently secure and resilient, and we achieve that by making our security principles an invisible part of the developer experience. The Role The Engineering Director, Security will be a senior leader within our global Security organisation, partnering directly with the CISO and other senior engineering leaders. You will lead an organisation of 30–50 engineers and leaders to define and deliver a strategy that protects our global footprint. We’re looking for a deeply technical software engineering leader who has built and led high performing infrastructure, platform, or distributed systems engineering organisations and can apply those skills to one of Monzo’s most important engineering challenges: making security an embedded, invisible property of how we build software. You do not need to come from a traditional security background. We care more about exceptional engineering leadership, organisational design, platform thinking, and strong technical judgement than deep specialisation in security. What you'll do * Drive the secure-by-design mandate, leading the transition from reactive security to proactive architectural invariants. Your goal is to ensure that our core platform primitives - compute, storage, networking and identity - are built with inherent security properties that cannot be bypassed. * Eliminate systemic risk by identifying fundamental, cross-cutting security problems and driving major software engineering improvements to solve them at the root.  * Partner with product and software engineering teams to embed a healthy security culture into Monzo’s product development process. * Cultivate an engineering-first culture, fostering a culture where security engineers are, first and foremost, software engineers. You’ll ensure your teams are delivering high-leverage tools and frameworks that enable the data and software engineering disciplines to move at the speed-of-thought, without compromising security. * Manage a high-performing group of software engineering leaders and senior individual contributors, nurturing a diverse organisation that thrives on solving the world’s most complex security challenges. * Collaborate with software engineering managers and engineering leaders to contribute to company-wide security best practices and standards. * Form a close alliance with the CISO, CTO, and Product leaders to advise on the long-term health of the business, ensuring our security roadmap is aligned with our global mission. Responsible for the engineering effectiveness and operational excellence of your teams, setting a high bar for performance, rigour, and inclusive leadership. What we are looking for  We are looking for a leader who has been in the weeds of technical detail and has moved into high-scale leadership without losing their technical edge. This is not a traditional Head of Security or CISO-style role, and we are intentionally looking beyond career security specialists. Strong candidates may come from software engineering, distributed systems, developer platforms, infrastructure engineering, or large-scale backend product engineering backgrounds. You do not need to have spent your career in security. What matters most is exceptional engineering leadership, strong technical judgement, and experience building highly reliable, secure-by-default software systems at scale. Whilst this role doesn’t require deep specialist security expertise, we’re looking for: * Architectural authority: You possess the technical depth to understand and challenge complex engineering decisions. You can lead a room of Principal Engineers through a deep-dive into distributed systems, or cryptographic trust boundaries. * Proven leadership: You have a track record of leading engineering organisations of 30–50 people in a high-growth, top-tier tech environment. You know how to structure teams for maximum impact and autonomy. * Software engineering experience: You likely spent the first half of your career as a Senior or Staff Engineer. You have a deep understanding of how systems are built. * Outcome-obsessed: You prioritise high-leverage work over process for process’s sake. You understand that good security looks like a platform that is secure by default, not a long list of compliance tickets. * Empathy & inclusion: You have a high degree of emotional intelligence and a relentless drive to create an inclusive, blameless team environment where everyone can do their best work. * Decisiveness in ambiguity: You are comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy, making high-stakes decisions in fast-moving, often time-sensitive scenarios. How we work 💻: Locations & Flexible Working :  Our main tech hub is in London, but our engineers live everywhere in the UK— from Brighton to the Western Isles.  We value meeting in person but there’s no pressure to come into the office, even if you're nearby. We believe you'll do your best work if you are where you want to be. If you live outside of London and we ask you to come into the office, Monzo will support you with the costs. ✨ Our offices are naturally social, especially Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, which happen to line up with our twice-weekly Monzo lunches & treat Thursdays 🍽️. Teams also schedule time together often for work and play – in or around the office, or online. Set up a work schedule that delivers impact and fits your life. At Monzo, we value connections, flexibility, and wellbeing. We keep our meetings during core hours to stay connected and believe in maintaining work/life balance.  You’ll be empowered to manage your work in a way that suits you and your team, giving you the freedom for children drop-offs and pick-ups, walking your dog or adventurous cat, avoiding peak commuting times or gym slots, appointments, or supporting your family in an emergency. 🕒✨ Work the way that works for you with Monzo! 💼 The interview process: Our interview process involves 3 main stages: 1. Recruiter Call (30 mins) You'll meet our Engineering Leadership Recruiter to discuss your experience and learn more about Monzo. They'll be your partner and guide throughout the interview process. 2. Initial Call (1 hour) You'll meet with our VP of Engineering. They'll ask you about your previous experience, in particular people leadership, product delivery and technical leadership. They’ll ask example based questions (‘Tell me about a time when…’) 3. Loop Stage - This is one stage with 4 interviews (totalling 4 hours) split between a collaboration with one of our engineers on a technical exercise, as well as execution and leadership interviews. At all stages we’ll create space for you to ask as many questions as you have, you’re interviewing us as well! Our average process takes around 3-4 weeks but we will always work around your availability. You will have the chance to speak to our recruitment team at various points during your process but if you do have any specific questions ahead of this please contact us on tech-hiring@monzo.com. What’s in it for you: 💰Base salary £170k - £225k + Equity + Benefits  ✈️ We can help you relocate to the UK ✅ We can sponsor visas 📍This role can be based in our London office, or we're open to distributed working within the UK (with ad hoc meetings in London). ⏰ We offer flexible working hours and trust you to work enough hours to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team. 📚Learning budget of £1,000 a year for books, training courses and conferences ➕And much more, see our full list of benefits here     ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Equal opportunities for everyone Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we’re making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. At Monzo, we’re embracing diversity by fostering an inclusive environment for all people to do the best work of their lives with us. This is integral to our mission of making money work for everyone. You can read more in our blog, 2026 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2025 Gender Pay Gap Report. We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, or veteran, neurodiversity or disability status. If you have a preferred name, please use it to apply. We don't need full or birth names at application stage 😊