Sr. Director, Back-End Engineering

Job Description – Sr. Director, TestOps

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, TestOps 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 TestOps, 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 TestOps 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 TestOps 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 TestOps, 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 TestOps, 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.