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.