Senior Staff Backend Engineer – Identity & Access Management

About the role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Staff Engineer to lead backend engineering for identity and access management (IAM) on Coupang’s next‑generation AI cloud platform. The team builds and operates core identity services that secure user and machine identities, authentication and authorization for large‑scale AI workloads.

Key responsibilities

• Lead and grow a high‑performing backend engineering team focused on IAM.
• Design and build scalable systems for user and machine identity lifecycle management.
• Implement modern authentication protocols such as OAuth2, OIDC, SAML and secure service‑to‑service authentication.
• Develop and evolve authorization frameworks using RBAC/ABAC models and policy engines like OPA.
• Ensure reliability, scalability and security of identity services handling 500K+ authentication requests daily.

Required profile

• 13‑17 years of backend software engineering experience.
• Strong experience with Java or Python and REST API design.
• Hands‑on experience with OAuth2, OIDC, SAML and other authentication/authorization technologies.
• Solid understanding of identity systems for users and machines, and service‑to‑service security.
• Experience working in cloud environments, preferably AWS.

Required skills

• Java
• Python
• REST API design
• OAuth2, OIDC, SAML
• AWS cloud platform
• RBAC / ABAC and OPA policy engine
• Kubernetes and cloud‑native architectures
• Distributed system security