Director of Search Retrieval

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 entrepreneurial 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.

Coupang is looking for a Director of Search Retrieval to own and drive Coupang’s strategy and execution for its core search ranking efforts. This role is a key addition to Coupang’s Search and Discovery leadership team in building and leading Coupang’s eCommerce Search and Discovery strategy and technology team into a world-class, cohesive, and innovative product search and discovery engine.
 
The Director of Search is responsible for technology across the search stack and will drive projects related to conversion prediction and other ranking components across the stack (i.e. in L1, L2, and L3 rankers), will identify and drive efforts related to novel retrieval sources, and will lead the team to explore green field opportunities based on Generative AI / LLMs. The scope is company-wide, with this team affecting results shown to every customer searching for products on Coupang, and this represents a unique opportunity to have scope this broad and flexible. This involves solving complex indexing, infrastructure, ranking, and modeling problems. You will hire key talent to innovate in the search space in order to Wow our Customers.

• Define the long term strategy and vision of the Search platform and oversee the design in conjunction with the engineering team
• Recruit and coach individual contributors and managers across the search org and develop that talent to create a world class engineering team
• Manage and execute against project plans and deliver commitments
• Work closely with the senior management team to ensure that development plans, resources, and strategies are coordinated across all departments in a cohesive and collaborative fashion
• Lead your team to develop new Machine Learning models and features, applying rigorous offline and online testing methodology
• Be responsible for the production system running those models
• Work with the team to mine data from logs to gain insights from customer behavior
• 10+ years experience working with large-scale, complex datasets to create and optimize machine learning models

• 3+ years management experience
• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or related science majors, Ph.D. strongly preferred
• Track record of diving into data to discover hidden patterns and solving problems with data science
• Fast paced self-learner with proven record of launching successful features and improving business metrics
• Understand production environment, continuous build, monitoring and alerting and able to dive deep to debug and resolve usual production issues
• Practical understanding and hands-on experience with supervised learning methods (linear and logistic regression, generalized linear models, decision trees, random forests, support vector machines, neural networks / deep learning, etc.) and unsupervised learning methods (K-means, hierarchical clustering)

• Hands on experience either directly training and applying Generative AI models / LLMs or working closely with your engineering team to do so

Pay & Benefits

Our compensation reflects the cost of labor across several US geographic markets. At Coupang, your base pay is one part of your total compensation. 

The base pay for this position ranges from $159,000 / year in our lowest geographic market to $324,000 / year in our highest geographic market. Pay is based on several factors including market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. 

General Description of All Benefits  

• Medical/Dental/Vision/Life, AD&D insurance  
• Flexible Spending Accounts (FSA) & Health Savings Account (HSA)  
• Long-term/Short-term Disability  
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP) program  
• 401K Plan with Company Match  
• 18-21 days of the Paid Time Off (PTO) a year based on the tenure  
• 12 Public Holidays  
• Paid Parental leave  
• Pre-tax commuter benefits  
• MTV - [Free] Electric Car Charging Station   

General Description of Other Compensation 

 “Other Compensation” includes, but is not limited to, bonuses, equity, or other forms of compensation that would be offered to the hired applicant in addition to their established salary range or wage scale. 

Coupang is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to actual or perceived race (including traits historically associated with race, including but not limited to hair texture and protective hair styles), color, religion, religious creed (including religious dress and grooming practices), sex or gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and medical conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding), gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, ,ancestry, national origin (including language use restrictions), age (40 and over), physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, HIV/AIDS or Hepatitis C status, family status (including but not limited to marital or domestic partnership status), military or veteran status, use of a trained dog guide or service animal, political activities or affiliations, ancestry, citizenship, family and medical leave status, status as a victim of any violent crime, or any other characteristic or class protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Coupang is also committed to providing a safe work environment for its employees and its consumers.   

If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application of recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at [email protected].