Senior Staff Backend Engineer - IAM

About the role

Coupang is building a next‑generation AI cloud platform and needs a senior leader to design and scale identity and access management services. The role focuses on creating secure, high‑throughput authentication and authorization systems that support hundreds of thousands of daily requests.

Key responsibilities

• Lead and grow a high‑performing backend engineering team focused on IAM.
• Drive development of core IAM capabilities including authentication, authorization, and identity lifecycle management.
• Design and build scalable systems for user and machine identity management in a cloud environment.
• Implement modern authentication protocols such as OAuth2, OIDC, and SAML, and secure service‑to‑service authentication.
• Build and evolve authorization frameworks leveraging RBAC/ABAC models and policy engines (e.g., OPA).
• Partner with cross‑functional teams to deliver secure, scalable infrastructure for AI workloads.
• Drive technical design, execution planning, and delivery of complex distributed systems.
• Ensure reliability, scalability, and security of identity systems as the platform scales rapidly.
• Mentor engineers and foster a strong engineering culture focused on ownership and excellence.

Required profile

• 13–17 years of backend software engineering experience.
• Strong experience in backend development using Java or Python with REST API design.
• Hands‑on experience with authentication and authorization technologies (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML).
• Solid understanding of identity systems for user and machine/workload identities.
• Experience with service‑to‑service authentication and distributed system security.
• Experience working in cloud environments, preferably AWS.
• Familiarity with PKI, certificate lifecycle management, and secure identity frameworks.
• Experience building IAM systems on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Knowledge of authorization frameworks such as RBAC, ABAC, and OPA.
• Exposure to Kubernetes and cloud‑native architectures.
• Strong problem‑solving, stakeholder management, and communication skills.

Required skills

• Java
• Python
• REST API design
• OAuth2
• OpenID Connect (OIDC)
• SAML
• AWS
• RBAC
• ABAC
• OPA
• Kubernetes