Sr. Director, Back-End Engineering

Job Description – Sr. Director, Test Ops

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, Test Ops 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 Test Ops, test infrastructure, or continuous-quality systems in a leading global technology company.

Key Responsibilities

• 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.

• Define and execute the Test Ops strategy across Tech Infrastructure and partner engineering organizations.

• Build a federated testing platform that supports infrastructure, platform, API, UI, integration, resilience, and release validation.

• Create repeatable test capabilities for Unified Staging and production-like environments.

• Partner with Developer Platform, SRE, Observability, Security, and domain teams to embed quality gates into delivery workflows.

• Own testing metrics including coverage, pass rate, escaped defects, flaky tests, execution time, environment readiness, and release confidence.

• Drive adoption through product management, customer enablement, documentation, office hours, and clear service-level objectives.

Test Platform & Automation

• Build self-service test planning, execution, orchestration, reporting, and evidence-management capabilities.

• Automate UI, API, service integration, infrastructure integration, and end-to-end test execution.

• Provide reusable test harnesses, reference applications, simulators, mocks, and service-virtualization capabilities.

• Integrate Test Ops with CI/CD, Global CD, Application Registry, observability, and release governance.

• Create quality gates that are risk-aware, fast, deterministic, and appropriate to service tiers.

• Reduce flaky tests, duplicated frameworks, manual validation, and fragmented tooling.

Unified Staging, Test Data & Resilience Validation

• Use Unified Staging as the default environment for validating Tech Infrastructure components and domain applications.

• Build compliant, desensitized, production-like test data generation and lifecycle management.

• Enable integration testing across identity, mesh, networking, databases, queues, storage, observability, and application dependencies.

• Partner with SRE to automate fault injection, DR scenarios, failover validation, load testing, and reliability certification.

• Ensure validation evidence can feed release decisions, RBD/RBO certification, and executive reliability metrics.

AI-Assisted Testing

• Build AI-assisted capabilities for feature test-plan generation, test-case generation, test-data generation, execution, failure analysis, and defect triage.

• Establish evaluation, safety, and quality mechanisms for AI-generated tests and recommendations.

• Use production telemetry and incident learnings to continuously improve test coverage and prioritize high-risk scenarios.

• Automate quality insights and next-best-action recommendations for engineers and release owners.

Talent Leadership & Organization

• Lead managers, technical leads, and senior engineers across test platform, automation, and quality engineering.

• Own organization design, hiring, leadership development, and succession planning.

• Build a strong engineering culture focused on platform products rather than manual test execution.

• Develop leaders who can independently own federation, test infrastructure, AI Test Ops, and resilience validation.

• Attract engineers with deep test infrastructure, distributed systems, developer tooling, and automation expertise.

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Own architecture for test orchestration, environment integration, test data, result storage, quality signals, and release gating.

• Define company standards for test APIs, frameworks, evidence, coverage, flakiness, and service-tier validation.

• Influence platform architecture to improve testability, observability, fault isolation, and safe deployment.

• Align test strategy with the broader observability and AIOps architecture so pre-release and post-release quality signals reinforce one another.

Execution & Impact

• Deliver measurable reductions in manual testing, execution time, escaped defects, flaky tests, and release-related incidents.

• Increase automated integration and resilience validation across Tier 0, Tier 1, and Tech Infrastructure services.

• Improve release confidence and developer productivity through reliable self-service testing.

• Establish strong execution mechanisms, customer feedback loops, and objective quarterly targets.

Essential Qualifications

• 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.

• Experience with Kubernetes, cloud-native testing, service mesh, fault injection, or chaos engineering.

• Experience building AI-assisted test generation or failure-analysis systems.

• Experience with load testing, DR validation, release certification, or production-readiness programs.

• 12+ years of experience in software engineering, test infrastructure, developer productivity, quality engineering, or platform engineering.

• 5+ years leading engineering teams and managers in a large-scale technology environment.

• 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.

• Demonstrated experience personally leading the architecture, build-out, launch, and scaled adoption of a Test Ops, test infrastructure, continuous-quality, or release-validation platform.

• Experience building test automation or testing platforms for distributed systems and continuous delivery.

• Deep understanding of CI/CD, test environments, test data, integration testing, reliability testing, and quality metrics.

• Experience driving cross-organizational adoption of common platforms and standards.

• Strong technical judgment, customer focus, and ability to translate strategy into measurable delivery.