Senior Staff, Machine Learning Engineer (Coupang Eats Search)

South Korea·Seoulsenior

OtherStaff Machine Learning Engineer

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Quick Summary

Key Responsibilities

Own the machine learning strategy, metrics, and execution for improving brand, store, dish, and product retrieval and increasing conversion across Coupang Eats Search surfaces.

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OtherStaff Machine Learning Engineer

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

Requirements

~1 min read

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.
S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related technical fields.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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 (recruitingops@coupang.com) 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.

Coupang is an equal opportunity employer. Our unprecedented success could not be possible without the valuable inputs of our globally diverse team.