Staff, Machine Learning Engineer - Coupang Play

About Coupang Play

Coupang Play is an OTT video streaming service. We offer a wide range of content, including Original Series, TV Shows, Movies, and Sports.

We are in the business of delivering exceptional storytelling. We produce award-winning scripted and unscripted Original Series, such as “Boyhood ”, “Anna ”, and “SNL Korea ”. We believe Sports can also be elevated by creative storytelling. Play is now an authoritative destination for Sports, broadcasting K-League, La Liga, Bundesliga, F1, NFL, and other leading leagues and tournaments. We also offer some of the latest movies that were just released in local theaters, bringing more exceptional storytelling to our customers.

To ensure that we deliver all content seamlessly, we invest in Engineering, Product, and Design. Coupang Play is available on all mobile devices, tablets, PC, Smart TV, Apple TV, and Android TV. Our teams keep optimizing how customers discover and stream both VOD and Live content. That includes investments in frontend, backend, and infrastructural developments. We also embrace Machine Learning to refine our CX.

We are still very early in our growth stage. If you enjoy solving complex problems using industry-leading technology or unconventional business approaches, please join us. We are building a world-class team of problem-solvers, all dedicated to delivering exceptional storytelling to our customers.

Role Overview

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Coupang Play, you will help shape the content discovery experience across our growing catalog of streaming video-on-demand titles, live events, and transactional video content.

You will lead the architecture, development, and evolution of large-scale search, retrieval, ranking, recommendation, and personalization systems that connect users with the most relevant content. Working closely with Machine Learning Scientists, Product Managers, and Engineering teams, you will build scalable, data-driven solutions that leverage user behavior, content understanding, and modern machine learning techniques to improve relevance, engagement, and overall customer experience.

What You Will Do

Own the architecture, development, and evolution of large-scale search, retrieval, ranking, recommendation, and personalization platforms.

Build content discovery solutions that help users find relevant content through search, recommendations, and personalized experiences.

Develop machine learning-driven systems that model user intent, content relationships, and user preferences to improve relevance and engagement.

Design, build, and operate scalable, low-latency online serving infrastructure for real-time retrieval, ranking, and recommendation workloads.

Drive continuous improvements in search and recommendation quality through experimentation, offline evaluation, and online A/B testing.

Define, monitor, and optimize key business and technical metrics, including relevance, engagement, conversion, latency, and system reliability.

Partner with ML Scientists, Product Managers, and cross-functional engineering teams to translate business objectives into scalable technical solutions.

Evaluate and adopt emerging technologies, algorithms, and industry best practices to advance Coupang Play's content discovery capabilities.

Basic Qualifications

Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related field.

7+ years of software engineering experience, including building and operating large-scale search, retrieval, recommendation, ranking, personalization, or other relevance-driven systems.

Proven experience designing and building distributed backend systems with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and low-latency performance.

Strong programming skills in Python and at least one additional language such as Go, Java, Scala, or C++.

Experience with cloud-native infrastructure and modern software engineering practices.

Familiarity with search platforms, vector search technologies, large-scale indexing systems, or recommendation infrastructure.

Solid understanding of machine learning concepts and experience applying data-driven approaches to improve customer experiences.

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to evaluate system performance and drive measurable improvements.

Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with experience working across engineering, product, and data science organizations.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with modern retrieval and ranking techniques, including lexical retrieval, semantic retrieval, embedding-based retrieval, hybrid retrieval, and learning-to-rank approaches.

Strong understanding of information retrieval, recommendation systems, ranking systems, personalization, or other content discovery domains.

Experience applying deep learning, foundation models, LLMs, or generative AI technologies to search, recommendation, or content discovery problems.

Experience with experimentation platforms, online evaluation methodologies, A/B testing, and relevance measurement frameworks.

Experience building or supporting multilingual content discovery experiences.

Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, or a related field.

Recruitment Process and Others

Recruitment Process

Application Review - 1st Job FitInterview - 2nd Tech Focus Interview - Leadership interview – 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.

Details to Consider

This job posting may be closed prior to the stated end date for application if all openings are filled. Coupang will be prioritizing applicants who have a current right to work in Singapore and do not require company sponsorship for an employment visa. 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. Those eligible for employment protection (recipients of veteran’s benefits, the disabled, etc.) may receive preferential treatment for employment in accordance with applicable laws. Job titles and responsibilities may be subject to change depending on the candidate’s overall experience, etc. This will be communicated to the candidate at the appropriate time before the offer. Hiring may be restricted in case the legal qualifications required for hiring and work performance is not met. This is a full-time regular position and includes 12 weeks of probation period; provided, however, the probationary period may be either skipped, shortened or extended if necessary for business purposes.

Privacy Notice

Your personal information will be collected and managed by Coupang as stated in the Application Privacy Notice located below.

https://privacy.coupang.com/en/land/jobs/