Director, Search Marketing

About the Role

Coupang is looking for a Director of Search Marketing to lead the search marketing portfolio and drive business performance across GMV, spend, efficiency, forecasting, and budget allocation.

This is a senior leadership role for a balanced performance marketing leader who combines strong commercial judgment with technical fluency. The ideal candidate understands search marketing at scale, can guide bidding and automation strategy, and can work effectively with engineering, ML, data science, and analytics teams. This leader will also manage a high-performing team and communicate search marketing performance clearly to senior leadership.

Key Responsibilities

Drive Search Marketing Business Performance

• Lead business performance for the search marketing portfolio across GMV, spend, efficiency, forecasting, and budget allocation.
• Translate company growth goals into channel-level targets, investment plans, and execution priorities.
• Balance growth, efficiency, spend constraints, and long-term channel health.

Lead Channel Strategy and Execution

• Oversee performance across major search and shopping platforms, including Naver and Google.
• Guide strategy across Ads, Shopping, and other search-led growth surfaces.
• Set priorities across campaigns, keywords, placements, product/feed inputs, and optimization opportunities.

Advance Bidding, Measurement, and Automation

• Apply strong understanding of bidding frameworks, auction dynamics, automated bidding, ROAS, marginal ROI, and budget elasticity.
• Partner with ML, engineering, data science, and analytics teams to improve bidding systems, measurement, forecasting, and diagnostics.
• Identify opportunities to reduce manual work through automation, tooling, rules, and scalable operating processes.

Communicate and Influence Across the Business

• Present performance, risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to senior leadership.
• Build concise, numbers-backed narratives that explain business performance and required actions.
• Collaborate closely with Finance, Engineering, ML/Data Science, Analytics, Product, Legal, and external platform partners.

Lead and Develop the Team

• Lead a team of search marketing professionals responsible for channel and placement-level execution.
• Set clear goals, operating cadence, priorities, and accountability across the team.
• Coach the team to improve analytical depth, technical fluency, business judgment, and communication quality.

Basic Qualifications

• Significant experience leading search marketing, performance marketing, growth marketing, or paid media at scale.
• Proven ownership of large-scale commercial outcomes such as GMV, revenue, spend, ROAS, ROI, margin, or equivalent business performance metrics.
• Strong understanding of search marketing mechanics, including bidding, auction dynamics, keyword strategy, budget allocation, shopping ads, and performance optimization.
• Technical fluency sufficient to partner with and challenge engineering, ML, data science, and analytics teams.
• Demonstrated ability to improve productivity through automation, tooling, process redesign, or scalable operating mechanisms.
• Strong executive communication skills, including the ability to explain numbers, defend tradeoffs, and influence senior stakeholders.
• Experience leading and developing teams in a fast-paced, high-performance environment.
• Fluency in Korean and English.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience managing search marketing for a large ecommerce, marketplace, retail, technology, or consumer platform business.
• Deep experience with Naver, Google, Kakao, or other major search, shopping, or digital advertising platforms.
• Experience with automated bidding, ML-driven optimization, attribution, incrementality, feed-based advertising, or marketing data infrastructure.
• Experience managing senior external platform relationships and negotiating for roadmap, beta access, data visibility, or commercial advantage.