Sr. Director, Back-End Engineering at Coupang

<p><strong>Job Description – Sr. Director, TestOps</strong></p> <p>Coupang operates a large distributed technology ecosystem where changes must be validated quickly, safely, and repeatedly across infrastructure and application boundaries. We are seeking a Director, TestOps to build and lead testing as a platform capability. This leader will own test automation, test environments and data, integration testing, resilience validation, quality signals, and AI-assisted testing. The mission is to move testing from a manual phase owned independently by teams into an automated, federated, and measurable platform that enables safe continuous delivery. We are looking for a visionary quality-platform leader who has previously built and scaled comparable TestOps, test infrastructure, or continuous-quality systems in a leading global technology company.</p> <h3>Key Responsibilities</h3> <ul> <li>Set a bold vision for testing as a company-wide platform capability and translate that vision into an executable roadmap adopted across infrastructure and domain organizations.</li> <li>Define and execute the TestOps strategy across Tech Infrastructure and partner engineering organizations.</li> <li>Build a federated testing platform that supports infrastructure, platform, API, UI, integration, resilience, and release validation.</li> <li>Create repeatable test capabilities for Unified Staging and production-like environments.</li> <li>Partner with Developer Platform, SRE, Observability, Security, and domain teams to embed quality gates into delivery workflows.</li> <li>Own testing metrics including coverage, pass rate, escaped defects, flaky tests, execution time, environment readiness, and release confidence.</li> <li>Drive adoption through product management, customer enablement, documentation, office hours, and clear service-level objectives.</li> </ul> <h3>Test Platform &amp; Automation</h3> <ul> <li>Build self-service test planning, execution, orchestration, reporting, and evidence-management capabilities.</li> <li>Automate UI, API, service integration, infrastructure integration, and end-to-end test execution.</li> <li>Provide reusable test harnesses, reference applications, simulators, mocks, and service-virtualization capabilities.</li> <li>Integrate TestOps with CI/CD, Global CD, Application Registry, observability, and release governance.</li> <li>Create quality gates that are risk-aware, fast, deterministic, and appropriate to service tiers.</li> <li>Reduce flaky tests, duplicated frameworks, manual validation, and fragmented tooling.</li> </ul> <h3>Unified Staging, Test Data &amp; Resilience Validation</h3> <ul> <li>Use Unified Staging as the default environment for validating Tech Infrastructure components and domain applications.</li> <li>Build compliant, desensitized, production-like test data generation and lifecycle management.</li> <li>Enable integration testing across identity, mesh, networking, databases, queues, storage, observability, and application dependencies.</li> <li>Partner with SRE to automate fault injection, DR scenarios, failover validation, load testing, and reliability certification.</li> <li>Ensure validation evidence can feed release decisions, RBD/RBO certification, and executive reliability metrics.</li> </ul> <h3>AI-Assisted Testing</h3> <ul> <li>Build AI-assisted capabilities for feature test-plan generation, test-case generation, test-data generation, execution, failure analysis, and defect triage.</li> <li>Establish evaluation, safety, and quality mechanisms for AI-generated tests and recommendations.</li> <li>Use production telemetry and incident learnings to continuously improve test coverage and prioritize high-risk scenarios.</li> <li>Automate quality insights and next-best-action recommendations for engineers and release owners.</li> </ul> <h3>Talent Leadership &amp; Organization</h3> <ul> <li>Lead managers, technical leads, and senior engineers across test platform, automation, and quality engineering.</li> <li>Own organization design, hiring, leadership development, and succession planning.</li> <li>Build a strong engineering culture focused on platform products rather than manual test execution.</li> <li>Develop leaders who can independently own federation, test infrastructure, AI TestOps, and resilience validation.</li> <li>Attract engineers with deep test infrastructure, distributed systems, developer tooling, and automation expertise.</li> </ul> <h3>Technical Leadership &amp; Architecture</h3> <ul> <li>Own architecture for test orchestration, environment integration, test data, result storage, quality signals, and release gating.</li> <li>Define company standards for test APIs, frameworks, evidence, coverage, flakiness, and service-tier validation.</li> <li>Influence platform architecture to improve testability, observability, fault isolation, and safe deployment.</li> <li>Align test strategy with the broader observability and AIOps architecture so pre-release and post-release quality signals reinforce one another.</li> </ul> <h3>Execution &amp; Impact</h3> <ul> <li>Deliver measurable reductions in manual testing, execution time, escaped defects, flaky tests, and release-related incidents.</li> <li>Increase automated integration and resilience validation across Tier 0, Tier 1, and Tech Infrastructure services.</li> <li>Improve release confidence and developer productivity through reliable self-service testing.</li> <li>Establish strong execution mechanisms, customer feedback loops, and objective quarterly targets.</li> </ul> <h3>Essential Qualifications</h3> <ul> <li>Leadership experience in a best-in-class test infrastructure, developer productivity, continuous delivery, or reliability engineering organization at hyperscaler, global consumer platform, or similarly scaled technology company.</li> <li>Experience with Kubernetes, cloud-native testing, service mesh, fault injection, or chaos engineering.</li> <li>Experience building AI-assisted test generation or failure-analysis systems.</li> <li>Experience with load testing, DR validation, release certification, or production-readiness programs.</li> <li>12+ years of experience in software engineering, test infrastructure, developer productivity, quality engineering, or platform engineering.</li> <li>5+ years leading engineering teams and managers in a large-scale technology environment.</li> <li>Recognized as a strong technology and organizational leader with the ability to define a differentiated quality engineering vision, attract exceptional talent, and influence senior stakeholders.</li> <li>Demonstrated experience personally leading the architecture, build-out, launch, and scaled adoption of a TestOps, test infrastructure, continuous-quality, or release-validation platform.</li> <li>Experience building test automation or testing platforms for distributed systems and continuous delivery.</li> <li>Deep understanding of CI/CD, test environments, test data, integration testing, reliability testing, and quality metrics.</li> <li>Experience driving cross-organizational adoption of common platforms and standards.</li> <li>Strong technical judgment, customer focus, and ability to translate strategy into measurable delivery.</li> </ul>