About us
Coupang Eats is creating new experiences that make everyday life more convenient for customers by expanding its services beyond food delivery into grocery and retail shopping. Driven by a constant commitment to delivering a better customer experience, we continue to challenge ourselves and lead innovation across new services and categories.
Coupang Eats empowers employees who create opportunities and deliver results by giving them greater roles and responsibilities. Here, you can turn your ideas into action, create even greater opportunities through your achievements, and experience the fulfillment of directly driving business growth.
If you want to grow alongside experts in their respective fields and take on even greater challenges together, join Coupang Eats today.
About the Role
Lead ML innovations on Retrieval and Relevance for Coupang Eats Search, one of Asia’s fastest-growing commerce businesses. You will shape how customers discover brands, stores, dishes, and products across food delivery and quick commerce, owning the machine learning models and strategies behind retrieval and relevance. As the ML Lead for Coupang Eats Search, you will be accountable for increasing successful retrieval of brands, stores, dishes, and products, and for driving measurable improvements in relevance and conversion. You will own the end-to-end stack, including query and menu understanding, candidate retrieval, relevance, and quality evaluation. You will establish a multi-year roadmap and lead projects across machine learning and engineering. Food-delivery search is dynamic, hyperlocal, and time-sensitive. Results must reflect customer intent while adapting to location, restaurant and menu availability, delivery time, price, promotions, quality, and real-time customer context. The ideal candidate combines deep search and NLP expertise with strong product judgment and organizational leadership, and can balance quality, latency, reliability, and experimentation velocity.
What You Will Do (Key Responsibilities)
- Customer and Business Outcomes: Own the machine learning strategy, metrics, and execution for improving brand, store, dish, and product retrieval and increasing conversion across Coupang Eats Search surfaces. Establish clear outcome metrics and targets and use rigorous experimentation and diagnostics to deliver sustained improvements while protecting key guardrail metrics and customer experience.
- Query and Product Understanding: improve query intent and entity understanding, menu and restaurant representation, typo tolerance, synonym expansion, and query rewriting.
- Retrieval: Advance lexical, semantic, and hybrid retrieval. design scalable, low-latency retrieval strategies, including indexing, feature pipelines, model life cycle.
- Relevance Measurement and Experimentation: Establish a rigorous quality framework using offline evaluation, human judgments, online experiments, guardrail metrics, and diagnostics for tail queries, cold-start cases, and customer segments.
- ML and LLM Innovation: Apply modern machine learning, embeddings, and LLMs to query and menu understanding, candidate generation, labeling, evaluation, and defect analysis, with clear customer impact and cost discipline.
- Multi-Market and Localization: Build reusable capabilities while adapting language understanding, cuisine taxonomies, customer preferences, and marketplace signals to the needs of each market.
- Organization Leadership: coach machine learning engineers, infra engineers, and work with data analysts to build a world-class Coupang Eats Search experience.
What We are Looking for
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years in search, information retrieval, NLP
- Deep expertise in product understanding, retrieval, relevance, and modern LLM techniques.
- Proven delivery of large-scale consumer Search systems with measurable customer and business impact.
- Experience in designing retrieval methods for distributed, low-latency systems at scale with relevance guarantee.
- Masters or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related technical fields.
Preferred Qualifications
- Food delivery, local commerce, e-commerce, advertising experience.
- Hyperlocal, time-sensitive ranking using location, availability, delivery time, price, and promotion signals.
- Multilingual or localized Search experience across markets.
- Practical experience with embeddings, transformers, LLMs that delivered measurable impact.
- Publications in search, NLP, e-commerce, or advertising.
Recruitment Process and Others:
Recruitment Process
- Application Review - 1st Interview - Virtual Onsite Interviews - Offer
- The exact nature of the recruitment process may vary according to the specific job and may be changed due to scheduling or other circumstances.
- Interview schedules and the results will be informed to the applicant via the e-mail address submitted at the application stage.
Things to Consider
- This job posting may be closed prior to the stated end date for application if all openings are filled.
- Coupang has the right to rescind an offer of employment if a candidate is found to have submitted false information as part of the application process.
- Coupang does not discriminate against disabled applicants or those with veteran status. We are proud to offer equal opportunities for all applicants.
Privacy Notice
- Your personal information will be collected and managed by Coupang as stated in the Application Privacy Notice located below.
- https://www.coupang.jobs/en/privacy-policy/
Document Return Policy
- This notification is given pursuant to Article 11 (6) of the Fair Hiring Procedure Act.
- A job applicant, who has applied but not been finally selected for a position at Coupang (the “ Company ”), may request the Company to return his/her hiring documents submitted pursuant to the Fair Hiring Procedure Act. However, this will not apply where the hiring documents were submitted via the website of the Company or e-mail, or where the job applicant submitted those documents voluntarily without a request from the Company. In addition, if the hiring documents were destroyed due to a natural disaster or any other reasons not attributable to the Company, such documents will be deemed to have been returned to the job applicant.
- A job applicant who wishes to request the return of his/her hiring documents pursuant to the main sentence of paragraph 2 above should fill out a “Request for Return of Hiring Documents” [Annex Form No. 3 in the Enforcement Rule of the Fair Hiring Procedure Act] and submit the request to the Company by email ([email protected]) In such case, within fourteen (14) days from the date of identifying the receipt of the request, the Company will send the hiring documents to the job applicant’s designated address via registered mail. Please be informed that the job applicant is required to pay the postage on the registered mail.
- In preparation for a job applicant’s request for the return of hiring documents pursuant to the main sentence of paragraph 2 above, the Company shall retain the original hiring documents submitted by the job applicant for 180 days from the completion of the recruiting process. If no request is made until the end of this period, all of his/her hiring documents will be destroyed immediately in accordance with the Personal Information Protection Act.
Equal Opportunities for All
Coupang is an equal opportunity employer. Our unprecedented success could not be possible without the valuable inputs of our globally diverse team.
Skills Required
- 10+ years of experience in search, information retrieval, or natural language processing
- Deep expertise in product understanding, retrieval, relevance, and modern LLM techniques
- Proven delivery of large-scale consumer search systems with measurable customer and business impact
- Experience designing retrieval methods for distributed, low-latency systems at scale with relevance guarantees
- S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science or a related technical field
- Experience in food delivery, local commerce, e-commerce, or advertising
- Experience with hyperlocal, time-sensitive ranking using location, availability, delivery time, price, and promotion signals
- Multilingual or localized search experience across markets
- Practical experience with embeddings, transformers, or LLMs that delivered measurable impact
- Publications in search, NLP, e-commerce, or advertising
Coupang Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Coupang and has not been reviewed or approved by Coupang.
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Healthcare Strength — Benefits are described as robust, including medical, dental, vision, disability, life, mental health, and transgender healthcare. Some locations also offer on-site or virtual health screenings that enhance preventive care access.
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Retirement Support — Financial programs include a 401(k) with company matching and an employee stock purchase plan alongside performance bonuses. Feedback suggests these elements provide a structured foundation for long-term savings and wealth building.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid time off is described as generous with accrual increasing with tenure, complemented by company-paid holidays and parental leave. Flexible work arrangements in some roles further support time away when needed.
Coupang Insights
What We Do
We exist to wow our customers. We know we’re doing the right thing when we hear our customers say, “How did we ever live without Coupang?” Born out of an obsession to make shopping, eating, and living easier than ever, we’re collectively disrupting the multi-billion-dollar e-commerce industry from the ground up. We are one of the fastest-growing e-commerce companies that established an unparalleled reputation for being a dominant and reliable force in South Korean commerce. We are proud to have the best of both worlds — a startup culture with the resources of a large global public company. This fuels us to continue our growth and launch new services at the speed we have been since our inception. We are all entrepreneurial, surrounded by opportunities to drive new initiatives and innovations. At our core, we are bold and ambitious people that like to get our hands dirty and make a hands-on impact. At Coupang, you will see yourself, your colleagues, your team, and the company grow every day. Our mission to build the future of commerce is real. We push the boundaries of what’s possible to solve problems and break traditional tradeoffs. Join Coupang now to create an epic experience in this always-on, high-tech, and hyper-connected world.
Why Work With Us
We are proud to have the best of both worlds — a startup culture with the resources of a large global public company. This fuels us to continue our growth and launch new services at the speed we have been since our inception. At our core, we are bold and ambitious people that like to get our hands dirty and make a hands-on impact.
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