Staff Software Engineer - IAM

We are looking for an experienced Staff Engineer to lead backend engineering efforts specifically focused on identity and access management (IAM) for our next-generation AI cloud platform. Coupang is building a platform designed to power AI workloads at scale. As part of this multi-year initiative, the Identity team is responsible for managing user and machine identities, authentication, authorisation, and secure service-to-service communication across the platform. This role will drive the development of foundational identity services that enable secure, scalable cloud infrastructure, handling hundreds of thousands of authentication events daily with rapidly growing scale.

Responsibilities:

• Build and scale identity and authentication systems for a next-generation AI platform.
• Work on cutting-edge IAM challenges, including OAuth2 OIDC, service-to-service authentication, and machine identity.
• Operate and scale systems handling 500K+ authentication requests daily.
• Collaborate across global teams in India, the US, and other regions.
• Lead and grow a high-performing backend engineering team focused on identity and access management.
• Drive development of core IAM capabilities, including authentication, authorisation, and identity lifecycle management.
• Design and build scalable systems for user identity and machine identity management within a cloud environment.
• Work on modern authentication protocols such as OAuth2 OIDC, and SAML and implement secure service-to-service authentication.
• Build and evolve authorisation 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.

Requirements:

• 10-12 years of backend software engineering experience with 3+ years in engineering management.
• Strong experience in backend development using Java or Python with REST API design.
• Hands-on experience with authentication and authorisation technologies (OAuth2 OIDC, and SAML).
• Solid understanding of identity systems, including user identity and machine/workload identity.
• Experience with service-to-service authentication and distributed system security.
• Strong problem-solving and execution skills with the ability to break down complex systems.
• Experience working in cloud environments (AWS preferred).
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building IAM systems on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, and GCP).
• Familiarity with PKI, certificate lifecycle management, and secure identity frameworks.
• Experience with authorisation frameworks (RBAC, ABAC, OPA).
• Exposure to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience working on large-scale distributed systems handling high request volumes.
• Background in platform engineering or infrastructure teams.