Company Introduction
We exist to wow our customers. We know we’re doing the right thing when we hear our customers say, “How did we ever live without Coupang?” Born out of an obsession to make shopping, eating, and living easier than ever, we’re collectively disrupting the multi-billion-dollar e-commerce industry from the ground up. We are one of the fastest-growing e-commerce companies that established an unparalleled reputation for being a dominant 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.
Sr. Staff Back-end Engineer II
About the Team
Coupang Intelligence Cloud (CIC) builds and operates the compute platform powering Coupang's AI/ML and large-scale workloads. We are now extending the platform from serverless container-based workload support to virtualization. We are building a VM offering on top of KVM with a tuned Linux kernel. We leverage hardware and software assisted virtualization to get baremetal-like performance within our VMs. We are building a OVN/OVS-based SDN that can be offloaded to the DPU. We are looking for a senior technical leader to drive it.
About the Role
As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will own the hypervisor, host kernel, and DPU layers of our multi-tenant VM platform. You will architect the QEMU-KVM stack, use Nvidia-DOCA for virtualization, design the SDN data plane using OVS and OVN, lead the GPU passthrough strategy for GPU and Infiniband, including NVSwitch and Shared NVLink topologies. You will be partnering closely with engineering leadership in the US, Korea, and China.
This is a hands-on individual contributor role with significant technical scope and the opportunity to shape the architecture from the ground up.
What You'll Do
- Own the hypervisor stack end-to-end — QEMU-KVM, libvirt, host kernel, and design such that the virtualization logic can be entirely offloaded to the DPU.
- Drive Linux kernel strategy for hypervisor hosts — kernel version selection, custom patches, KVM/vfio/vhost subsystem tuning, scheduler and memory tuning for VM workloads, backporting fixes, and contributing patches upstream
- Debug and resolve issues across the full virtualization stack — guest, QEMU, KVM, host kernel, and hardware — including performance regressions, livelock, and corner cases that surface only at fleet scale
- Architect and own the multi-tenant VM and BareMetal platform, including VM/BareMetal lifecycle. Design and implement the SDN data plane using OVS and OVN — OpenFlow pipeline design, VXLAN/Geneve tunneling, distributed routing, and per-tenant network isolation.
- Lead the GPU virtualization strategy: SR-IOV, PCIe passthrough, IOMMU/NUMA topology, and Shared NVLink via NVIDIA Fabric Manager on B200/GB300/RV200.
- Drive technical decisions across squads — write design docs, lead design reivew sessions, partner with networking, storage, and platform teams in the US, Korea, China, and India
- Set the technical bar for code review, design, and operational excellence; mentor senior and staff engineers
- Own production reliability for the virtualization platform — define SLOs, drive incident response, and meet a 99%+ availability target as the platform scales
What We're Looking For
- 12+ years of systems software engineering experience, with at least 6 years focused on virtualization, hypervisors, and/or the Linux kernel
- Deep, hands-on expertise with QEMU-KVM internals — virtio, vhost-user, machine types, CPU topology, NUMA pinning, hugepages, live migration
- Strong Linux kernel proficiency — KVM, vfio, vhost, namespaces, cgroups, netfilter, eBPF, scheduler, memory management; comfortable reading and patching kernel code
- Experience building, customizing, or maintaining a production Linux kernel — config tuning, patch management, backports, and (ideally) upstream contributions
- Production experience with Open vSwitch — OpenFlow pipeline design, datapath performance tuning (DPDK or kernel datapath), conntrack, debugging at scale
- Strong working knowledge of OVN — logical switches/routers, ACLs, distributed gateway routers, NB/SB databases
- Solid networking fundamentals: VXLAN, GENEVE, BGP, EVPN, L2/L3 routing, multicast, MTU/MSS handling
- Strong systems programming in C and/or Go; contributes to large open-source codebases
- Track record of leading complex, cross-team technical initiatives end-to-end
Nice to Have
- Upstream contributions to the Linux kernel (KVM, vfio, vhost, networking, scheduler, or mm subsystems)
- Experience with KubeVirt or other Kubernetes-native virtualization platforms
- GPU virtualization experience — SR-IOV, vGPU, PCIe passthrough, IOMMU groups, NVSwitch/NVLink topology on NVIDIA H100/H200/B200
- Production experience operating BGP EVPN fabrics (Arista EOS, Cumulus, or SONiC)
- Upstream contributions to OVS, OVN, QEMU, libvirt, or DPDK
- Experience with cloud-init, Cloud Hypervisor, or Firecracker
- Experience designing for hyperscale environments — thousands of hypervisors, tens of thousands of VMs, multi-region
Why You'll Love It Here
- Greenfield architectural ownership — you are not maintaining someone else's stack; you are defining ours
- Full-stack virtualization scope: leveraging DPU, using host kernel's hypervisor, QEMU, SR-IOV, PCIe device passthrough.
- Direct partnership with engineering leadership in the US — your technical decisions shape the platform globally, not just in India
- Strong technical peers across networking, GPU systems, and Kubernetes control plane
- Patent opportunities, conference talks, and upstream open-source contributions are actively encouraged
Details to consider
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
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Equal Opportunities for All
Coupang is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to equal opportunity regardless of color, ancestry, religion, sex, nation origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender identity or veteran status. Our unprecedented success could not be possible without the valuable inputs of our globally diverse team.
