How to Apply to SOOP (AfreecaTV)

23 min read Last updated April 20, 2026 6 open positions
Blake Crosley
Blake Crosley Researched using publicly available information, hiring data, and ATS analysis.

Key Takeaways

  • SOOP Co., Ltd. (KOSDAQ: 067160), formerly known as AfreecaTV until the global rebrand in October 2024, is South Korea's largest live-streaming platform, headquartered in Seoul with approximately 700 employees.
  • Founder Chung Chan-Yong has been CEO and chairman since 2007 and remains the dominant strategic and cultural force inside the company; SOOP's operating posture cannot be read separately from his long-tenure founder-CEO leadership.
  • Twitch withdrew from the Korean market on February 27, 2024 (citing operating-cost economics around Korean network usage fees), and SOOP captured the larger share of the migration, including a roughly fifty-percent surge in monthly active users and a substantial inflow of senior Korean Twitch broadcasters who signed migration deals with the platform.
  • The October 2024 rebrand from AfreecaTV to SOOP was a deliberate signal of (a) a global product play targeting Thailand, Vietnam, and the broader Southeast Asian region under a clean, English-friendly brand and (b) a maturing platform identity inside Korea while preserving the underlying broadcaster, chat, and Star Balloon virtual-gifting community.
  • Inside Korea, SOOP's primary live-streaming competitor is Naver's Chzzk (launched 2024 to capture the Twitch-Korea exit); YouTube Live is a perpetual cross-platform competitor for creator attention; Twitch remains a competitor in international markets where SOOP is expanding but no longer competes inside Korea.
  • SOOP operates a significant in-house esports business (the long-running AfreecaTV Starcraft League ASL, Tekken, fighting games, and partnership programming with major Korean esports orgs) and a multi-year content partnership with CJ ENM Mnet and other Korean media partners.
  • Recruitment runs through SOOP's custom Korean-language recruit portal on the company's corporate domain (recruit.sooplive.co.kr / sooplive.co.kr → recruitment), not Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, or any global ATS. Wanted, JobKorea, Saramin, Catch, Jobplanet, Linkareer, Comento, and Programmers mirror the postings but redirect to the official portal for binding submission.
  • Hiring runs on parallel tracks: 신입 공채 (semi-annual mass new-graduate open recruitment) and 수시채용 (rolling experienced and specialty hiring, particularly for engineering, product, and the global-expansion organization).
  • Korean-language professional fluency is the baseline for Seoul HQ roles; English is meaningfully weighted only for global-expansion and Southeast Asia regional roles, where bilingual or trilingual operation (Thai, Vietnamese, English, sometimes Mandarin) is a real structural advantage.
  • Engineering hiring is concentrated in live-streaming and real-time infrastructure, mobile (iOS/Android), recommendation and discovery, data and ML, trust-and-safety, and the global-product engineering pod. Product hiring spans creator tools, viewer experience, monetization, esports, and global-product. Content and operations hiring is heavy on BJ 매니저 (broadcaster relationship managers) and trust-and-safety. Business hiring covers advertising, partnerships, commerce, IR/finance, and global business development.

About SOOP (AfreecaTV)

SOOP Co., Ltd. (KOSDAQ: 067160), known until October 2024 as AfreecaTV (아프리카TV), is South Korea's largest live-streaming platform and one of the most operationally interesting companies in Korean internet media. The firm is headquartered in Seoul, with its main offices on Tower B at the Pangyo-style tech corridor footprint that AfreecaTV has occupied for most of the past decade, and it employs approximately 700 people across product, engineering, content operations, broadcaster relations, advertising, business development, finance, HR, and the still-young global organization standing up the international SOOP product. Founder Chung Chan-Yong (정찬용, often anglicized as Chan-Yong Chung) has been CEO and chairman since 2007 and remains the dominant strategic and cultural force inside the company; he is one of the longest-tenured continuously-serving founder-CEOs in Korean listed-tech history, and any honest read of SOOP's operating posture has to start from his personal stamp on the business. The company is publicly listed on the KOSDAQ under the legacy ticker 067160 (the ticker did not change with the rebrand) and is followed by domestic equity research desks at the major Korean brokers; its market capitalization, revenue, and profitability figures place it solidly among the mid-cap Korean internet companies, with revenue concentration in Korean live-streaming advertising, the Star Balloon (별풍선) virtual-gifting economy that flows from viewers to broadcasters (BJ — Broadcast Jockey, the Korean term that AfreecaTV pioneered), platform commission on those gifts, esports broadcasting rights and tournaments operated through SOOP's in-house esports business, and a growing slice of brand-partnership and commerce revenue. The single most consequential event in the company's recent history was Twitch's withdrawal from the Korean market in February 2024. Twitch announced in late 2023 that it would shut down operations in Korea, citing operating costs in Korea (particularly network usage fees levied on traffic-heavy services under the Korean network-fee debate, plus the costs of running a localized service) as roughly ten times higher than in other markets. The shutdown took effect on February 27, 2024, and the immediate beneficiaries were AfreecaTV and Naver's then-new Chzzk (치지직) — but AfreecaTV captured the larger share of the migration, particularly among the established Korean creator base that had been split between the two platforms for nearly a decade. Public reporting and the company's own disclosures point to a roughly fifty-percent surge in monthly active users in the months following Twitch's exit, alongside a substantial inflow of senior Korean Twitch streamers who signed migration deals with AfreecaTV during and after the shutdown window. The company aggressively recruited Twitch's top-tier Korean broadcasters with one-time migration incentives and contract bonuses, and the resulting concentration of broadcaster talent meaningfully strengthened SOOP's already-dominant Korean position. The rebrand from AfreecaTV to SOOP (officially announced and rolled out in October 2024) was a deliberate strategic signal of two things at once. First, it was a global-product play: AfreecaTV is a difficult brand to scale internationally (a literal translation of the original 'Anyone can FREE broadCAsting' acronym does not travel, and in some markets the legacy name carries connotations the company does not want), and SOOP is a clean, short, English-friendly name that the company has chosen as the brand for its global push, beginning with Thailand and Vietnam and extending toward broader Southeast Asia. Second, it was a product and image refresh inside Korea: SOOP signals a maturing platform identity beyond the somewhat rough, internet-1.0-flavored AfreecaTV brand of the 2000s and 2010s, while preserving the underlying community, BJ relationships, virtual-gifting economy, and chat-driven culture that built the business. Inside Korea, the consumer product still carries strong operational continuity with the AfreecaTV that users have known for nearly two decades; outside Korea, SOOP is a green-field global product targeting Southeast Asian gaming and lifestyle creators. The two products run on a substantially shared platform and infrastructure stack but have different growth strategies, monetization tuning, and content moderation profiles. The competitive landscape SOOP operates in is unusually concentrated. Inside Korea, the primary competitor is Naver's Chzzk, which launched in beta in late 2023 and went general-availability in 2024 squarely to capture the Twitch-Korea exit; Chzzk is heavily resourced (Naver is one of the two dominant Korean internet companies), is technically polished, and is a credible long-run threat — but it has not displaced SOOP at the top of Korean live-streaming and has not yet replicated the depth of the BJ relationships, the virtual-gifting culture, or the esports broadcasting franchise that anchor SOOP's Korean business. YouTube Live is a perpetual cross-platform competitor for creator attention and is meaningfully large in Korea but operates as a multi-purpose video platform rather than a live-streaming-first community, and it does not replicate the Star Balloon virtual-gifting economy. Twitch remains a competitor in the international markets where SOOP is expanding (Thailand, Vietnam, the broader region) but no longer competes inside Korea. Beyond the live-streaming pure-plays, SOOP also competes for advertising and creator attention against Naver, Kakao, the major Korean OTTs, and the global streaming platforms. The company is also a significant operator in Korean esports. SOOP runs in-house tournaments and broadcasts — the long-running AfreecaTV Starcraft League (ASL) is one of the longest-continuously-running competitive Starcraft tournaments anywhere, and SOOP also operates and broadcasts events in Tekken, fighting games, FIFA / EA FC, and several other titles, plus partnership programming with major esports organizations. SOOP has a multi-year content partnership with CJ ENM's Mnet (the music-and-entertainment cable channel of the CJ ENM media group) and other Korean media partners, which surface music, idol, and entertainment programming on the SOOP platform alongside the gaming, lifestyle, and chat-driven verticals. For candidates, the practical implication of all of this is that SOOP is hiring against an unusually well-defined growth thesis: defend and expand the post-Twitch Korean dominance, ship the global SOOP product into Southeast Asia, deepen the esports and entertainment-partnership franchise, and modernize the platform technically and brand-wise without breaking the broadcaster and viewer community that drives the revenue model. Engineering hiring is concentrated in live-streaming infrastructure (low-latency video delivery, transcoding, CDN optimization, mobile clients on iOS and Android, web client modernization), the recommendation and discovery surfaces, the chat and real-time interaction stack that handles millions of concurrent messages, the virtual-gifting and payments backend, content moderation tooling and trust-and-safety, and the global-product engineering organization standing up the SOOP international infrastructure. Product hiring spans creator tools, viewer experience, monetization, esports, and global-product PMs. Content and operations hiring is heavy on broadcaster relations (BJ 매니저 — the operational owners of broadcaster relationships and partnership terms), trust-and-safety, content moderation, esports operations, and live-event production. Business hiring covers advertising sales, brand partnerships, commerce, IR/finance, and the global business-development team building Southeast Asian creator partnerships. Recruitment runs through both the traditional Korean 신입 공채 (gongchae, semi-annual mass new-graduate open recruitment) cycle and a steady stream of 수시 (sushi, ad-hoc experienced hiring) for specialized engineering, product, and global-expansion roles, all administered through SOOP's custom Korean-language recruit portal. Korean-language professional fluency is the baseline expectation for Seoul HQ roles; English is meaningfully weighted only for global-expansion and Southeast Asia regional roles.

Application Process

  1. 1
    Identify the right channel

    Identify the right channel. SOOP runs two parallel hiring tracks: the Korean 신입 공채 (semi-annual mass new-graduate open recruitment, with cycles typically clustering in spring and autumn though SOOP's exact calendar is more flexible than the big chaebol cycles) and 수시채용 (rolling experienced and specialty hiring posted as needs arise — senior engineers, product managers, BJ relationship managers, esports operations leads, advertising sales, and the steadily growing global-expansion organization). Most experienced candidates will enter through the 수시 track; new graduates without prior internship conversion paths should plan around the 공채 windows.

  2. 2
    Use the official portal

    Use the official portal. SOOP runs its hiring through a custom Korean-language recruitment portal hosted on the company's corporate domain (recruit.sooplive.co.kr / sooplive.co.kr → recruitment subsection, with the legacy afreecatv.com careers entry redirecting into the same flow during the rebrand transition). The portal is not Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, SuccessFactors, or any global ATS; it is an in-house Korean recruiter system. Job-aggregator listings on Wanted, JobKorea, Saramin, Catch, Jobplanet, Linkareer, Comento, and Programmers (the engineering-specific Korean job board) mirror SOOP's postings, but the binding application must be submitted through SOOP's official recruit portal. Wanted in particular is the most active mirror for SOOP's experienced-engineering roles and is a reasonable monitoring channel.

  3. 3
    Confirm baseline eligibility

    Confirm baseline eligibility. Across all tracks, SOOP requires a completed bachelor's degree (or confirmed graduation in the cycle year for 신입 candidates), no overseas-travel restrictions, completed military service or a documented exemption for male Korean applicants, and the right to work in Korea. Korean nationality is not formally required, but Seoul HQ roles assume native or near-native Korean professional communication; foreign nationals must hold an F-series, E-7, D-10 (job-seeker), or convertible visa class. SOOP is comparatively open to foreign applicants for engineering roles where the work is technical and the team can absorb an English-friendly seat, and is structurally more open to foreign applicants in the global-expansion organization where bilingual or trilingual operation is the entire point of the role.

  4. 4
    Choose the right job family

    Choose the right job family. SOOP's organization is recognizably structured around the core platform and the growing global product. Engineering lanes include backend platform, live-streaming and media infrastructure (encoding, transcoding, CDN, low-latency delivery), iOS, Android, web/frontend, data engineering and ML (recommendation, discovery, search, abuse detection), DevOps and SRE, security, and the global-product engineering pod. Product lanes include creator-tools PM, viewer-experience PM, monetization and virtual-gifting PM, esports PM, and global-product PM. Content and operations lanes include BJ 매니저 (broadcaster relationship managers, the operational backbone of the platform's creator economy), partnership operations with esports orgs and entertainment partners (CJ ENM Mnet and others), trust-and-safety and content moderation, live-event production, and customer support. Business lanes cover advertising sales, brand partnerships, commerce/e-commerce, IR/finance, HR, legal, and the global business-development team building creator and partnership pipelines in Thailand, Vietnam, and the broader Southeast Asian markets. Picking the wrong lane is the single most common avoidable rejection cause; SOOP postings are specific about the team and the function, and the binding application is to a lane, not to the company in general.

  5. 5
    Submit the 자기소개서 (jaso) or experienced-hire equivalent

    Submit the 자기소개서 (jaso) or experienced-hire equivalent. For 신입 공채, SOOP uses the standard Korean jaso essay format with several prompts, typically including 성장과정 (your formative experiences and the events that shaped you), 지원동기 (why SOOP specifically, with the prompt structured to test whether you understand SOOP's post-Twitch Korean position, the global rebrand, the BJ-driven creator economy, and the strategic thesis under Chung Chan-Yong rather than generic praise of 'Korea's leading streaming platform'), 직무 이해 및 입사 후 포부 (your understanding of the chosen function and your post-entry contribution plan), and a behavioral or experience prompt asking for a concrete story (a failure overcome, a team experience, a project you owned). Strong essays cite SOOP-specific facts: the post-Twitch-Korea-exit MAU surge, the AfreecaTV-to-SOOP rebrand strategy, the Thailand and Vietnam global push, the ASL Starcraft League and broader esports operation, the CJ ENM Mnet partnership, the Star Balloon virtual-gifting economy, and CEO Chung Chan-Yong's stated multi-year priorities. For 수시 (experienced) hires, the equivalent is a Korean-language application form combined with a CV/resume and, for engineering and product roles, a short written response to a domain-specific question or a portfolio/GitHub link.

  6. 6
    Pass the document screen

    Pass the document screen. SOOP's 서류 stage is the dominant filter for 공채 and a meaningful filter for 수시. Reviewers score essays and credentials against an internal rubric that weighs lane-fit, evidence of relevant skill, demonstrated SOOP-specific motivation, and writing quality. Generic 'I love streaming, I want to work at a big tech company' essays are reliably rejected; specific, evidence-based essays advance.

  7. 7
    Complete any pre-interview assessments

    Complete any pre-interview assessments. Engineering candidates should expect a coding test (typically administered through Programmers or a similar Korean coding-test platform, with problems calibrated to the lane — algorithms and data structures for backend and infrastructure, mobile-specific tasks for iOS/Android, frontend tasks for web, SQL and modeling tasks for data engineering and ML). Some product and content roles include a take-home case (a product proposal, a creator-economy analysis, a moderation policy memo) with a typical turnaround of three to seven days. SOOP does not consistently use the SK-style or Samsung-style aptitude test (인적성) for the new-graduate 공채 the way the chaebol financial firms do, but some recent cycles have included a lighter-touch personality and basic-aptitude module — preparation with a standard Korean 인적성 problem book is low-cost insurance.

  8. 8
    1차 면접 (실무진

    1차 면접 (실무진 — working-level interview). The first in-person or video interview round is conducted by working-level managers and peers from your applied team. Format runs 60 to 90 minutes and is heavily lane-specific. Engineering interviews include a live or asynchronous coding round (algorithms, data-structures, system-design questions calibrated to seniority — for senior backend engineers expect a scaled live-streaming or chat-system design question), a deep dive into recent projects (be ready to explain technical decisions, trade-offs, what you would do differently, and how you handled production incidents), and behavioral questions about collaboration, ownership, and how you operate in ambiguous fast-moving product environments. Product interviews include a product-sense case (often grounded in SOOP's own surfaces — broadcaster discovery, viewer retention, monetization, moderation), a metrics and analytics case, and behavioral questions. Content/operations interviews include a scenario or role-play (a difficult BJ relationship, a moderation decision under public scrutiny, a partnership negotiation) and behavioral questions. Business interviews include a sales or partnership case and behavioral questions. Korean is the default language for Seoul HQ interviews; some engineering and global roles may run partly or fully in English at the candidate's request and the team's comfort.

  9. 9
    2차 면접 (임원

    2차 면접 (임원 — executive round). A smaller panel of senior leaders from the relevant division and HR. This round weighs character, long-term commitment, and cultural fit with SOOP's operating culture under Chung Chan-Yong. Questions skew personal and strategic: how you think about the Korean live-streaming market and SOOP's position in it, how you reconcile the BJ-driven creator economy with the trust-and-safety challenges that come with it, your view on the AfreecaTV-to-SOOP rebrand and the global push, your career horizon, and your willingness to commit to Seoul (or to a regional-market role for the global-expansion organization). Dress code for in-person rounds is business-casual to business-formal — SOOP is more relaxed on dress than the financial chaebols but more formal than a Western-style consumer-internet startup; a clean, conservative outfit lands well.

  10. 10
    Reference checks (some senior roles), background and credit checks, offer negoti

    Reference checks (some senior roles), background and credit checks, offer negotiation, and onboarding. Senior 수시 hires for IB-adjacent finance, executive product, and partnership roles may include a reference-check stage (typically two to three professional references, contacted by recruiter or hiring manager). All hires complete a background check (Korean labor-law standard, with additional financial or trust-and-safety screening for relevant roles). Compensation negotiation has limited room for 신입 공채 entry levels (where the compensation scale is largely fixed by cohort and role) and meaningful room for experienced 수시 hires; equity is uncommon for individual contributors but selectively used for senior leaders. Entry classes for 공채 typically share a multi-week onboarding program at headquarters that builds the cohort bond (입사동기) central to Korean corporate culture.

Resume Tips for SOOP (AfreecaTV)

recommended

Submit Korean

Submit Korean. The binding document for nearly every Seoul HQ role is the SOOP recruit portal application in Korean, in the company's prescribed prompt format. A US/UK-style English resume is supplementary at best and is irrelevant for the new-graduate 공채 pipeline; submit one only if a 수시 posting explicitly asks for it (some global-expansion and Southeast Asia regional postings do, and bilingual submission is welcomed for global-product engineering roles).

recommended

Stay inside the character limits

Stay inside the character limits. SOOP jaso prompts have hard character caps, typically in the 500–1,500 자 (Korean characters, including spaces — 공백 포함) range per item. Going under roughly 70% of the cap signals weak commitment; the system silently truncates over-cap submissions. Plan, draft in a separate document, and paste in only after you have the right length.

recommended

Lead with SOOP-specific evidence, not generic praise

Lead with SOOP-specific evidence, not generic praise. Cite at least two verifiable, current facts about the company in your motivation section: the post-Twitch-Korea-exit MAU surge (Twitch shut down Korean operations on February 27, 2024, and SOOP captured the larger share of the migration), the AfreecaTV-to-SOOP global rebrand of October 2024, the Thailand and Vietnam international expansion, the ASL Starcraft League and broader esports franchise, the CJ ENM Mnet partnership, the Star Balloon virtual-gifting model, the long tenure of CEO Chung Chan-Yong since 2007, or specific product surfaces you have used as a viewer or creator. Generic praise of 'Korea's leading live-streaming platform' reads as boilerplate.

recommended

Show that you actually use the product

Show that you actually use the product. SOOP weighs cultural and product fluency unusually heavily for a Korean company — interviewers across engineering, product, and content roles routinely ask candidates which BJs they watch, which streams they have spent the most time on, and what they would change about the product. Surface a genuine, honest viewer relationship in your essay or cover letter (which categories you watch, which features you use, how the experience compares to Chzzk or YouTube Live), but do not fabricate enthusiasm — interviewers can tell, and inauthenticity reads as worse than admitting you are a casual viewer.

recommended

Quantify in Korean conventions

Quantify in Korean conventions. Korean jaso prefers concrete, cohort-relative numbers: 'top 10% of 200 students,' 'led a 6-person team,' 'reduced API latency from 800ms to 120ms,' 'managed a community of 30,000 viewers.' For engineering candidates, prefer scale-and-impact numbers (queries per second, concurrent connections, data volume processed, latency percentiles, incident-recovery times) over generic seniority claims.

recommended

For engineering candidates, foreground live-streaming, real-time, and high-scale

For engineering candidates, foreground live-streaming, real-time, and high-scale experience. SOOP's technical center of gravity is real-time video delivery at Korean scale, low-latency chat handling millions of concurrent messages, mobile clients (iOS and Android) under heavy contention, and a recommendation and discovery layer that ranks tens of thousands of concurrent live broadcasts. Resumes that show concrete experience with WebRTC, HLS, RTMP, low-latency streaming protocols, CDN configuration, video encoding and transcoding, scaled chat infrastructure (Redis, Kafka, custom message brokers), or comparable problems will outperform generic backend resumes — even for candidates without prior streaming-platform experience, the relevant signals from gaming, fintech, or telecom backends transfer well if surfaced explicitly.

recommended

For product candidates, foreground creator-economy or community-platform experie

For product candidates, foreground creator-economy or community-platform experience. SOOP's product is a two-sided creator-driven marketplace, and PMs who can speak fluently about creator monetization, two-sided market design, community moderation trade-offs, retention and engagement loops in live-only formats, and the specific Korean live-streaming culture (BJ-viewer relationships, virtual gifting, the chat-driven format) will outperform generic consumer-product PMs.

recommended

For content and operations candidates, foreground broadcaster relationships, tru

For content and operations candidates, foreground broadcaster relationships, trust-and-safety judgment, and event-operations experience. The BJ 매니저 role in particular weighs interpersonal judgment, the ability to manage difficult creator personalities at scale, and the operational discipline to administer a large partnership portfolio — emphasize concrete examples of partnership management, conflict resolution, and policy enforcement in your essays.

recommended

List SOOP-relevant credentials

List SOOP-relevant credentials. Useful certifications include AWS / GCP / Azure cloud certifications (SOOP runs significant cloud infrastructure), 정보처리기사 (the Korean information-processing engineer credential), Korean software-architecture or security credentials, language credentials (TOPIK 6 if you are a foreign applicant; English credentials such as TOEIC, OPIc, or TOEIC Speaking for global-product roles), and for business candidates the Korean 한경TESAT, MAT, or sales-track credentials. For Southeast Asia regional roles, Thai or Vietnamese language ability (with a credential or a verifiable working-level claim) is a meaningful differentiator.

recommended

If you are a foreign applicant, be explicit about Korean fluency, visa status, a

If you are a foreign applicant, be explicit about Korean fluency, visa status, and your bilingual or trilingual value. Claim TOPIK level (6 is the practical bar for HQ office work), name the visa class you hold or are eligible for (F-2/F-4/F-5/E-7/D-10), and acknowledge you understand Korean office norms (회식, 존댓말, 입사동기 cohort culture, the operating cadence of a Chung-Chan-Yong-run company). Foreign applicants targeting the global-expansion organization should lean explicitly into a clear country or language value proposition (Thai for the Thailand expansion, Vietnamese for the Vietnam expansion, English for the broader global product, Mandarin or Bahasa for adjacent markets); vagueness is interpreted as a soft 'no.'

ATS System: Custom in-house Korean recruitment portal on SOOP's corporate domain

SOOP does not use Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, SuccessFactors, or any global ATS for its Seoul HQ pipeline. The official application portal is a custom Korean-built recruitment system hosted on the company's corporate domain (recruit.sooplive.co.kr / sooplive.co.kr → recruitment subsection, with the legacy afreecatv.com careers paths redirecting into the same flow during the rebrand transition). Like most Korean tech-company recruitment platforms, the portal is Korean-language by default and is best accessed from a Korean residential or corporate IP — overseas access generally works but can occasionally hit access friction. During open-recruitment windows, the company publishes a recruitment landing page with the cycle timeline, the prompt list, the lane descriptions, and the link into the application module. Job-aggregator listings on Wanted, JobKorea, Saramin, Catch, Jobplanet, Linkareer, Comento, and Programmers mirror SOOP's open postings — Wanted is particularly active for SOOP's experienced engineering roles — but the binding application must go through the official SOOP recruit portal. There is no automated keyword-parsing 'ATS' in the Anglo-American sense; the portal is a structured form-collection and screening workflow that feeds essays, credentials, and assessment results to internal HR reviewers and the hiring teams. Final document-stage decisions are made by human reviewers scoring against an internal rubric and forwarding shortlists to division hiring managers. Outside open 공채 cycles, the portal still hosts 수시 (rolling) postings continuously, particularly for engineering, product, and the global-expansion organization.

  • Apply only through the official SOOP recruit portal for binding submission. Treat Wanted, JobKorea, Saramin, Catch, and other aggregator listings as discovery channels — they will route you back to the official portal for the actual application.
  • Submit Korean for Seoul HQ roles unless the posting explicitly requests an English or bilingual application. Global-expansion roles based in Thailand, Vietnam, or the broader region are the main exception and are often bilingual by design.
  • Stay inside character caps on jaso prompts (typically 500–1,500 Korean characters per item, including spaces), draft in a separate document, and paste cleanly into the form. Do not attempt to game the limits with formatting tricks; the portal sanitizes input.
  • Complete every field in the application form, even optional ones. Korean recruitment portals weigh completeness as a soft signal of seriousness, and incomplete applications can be deprioritized in document-stage review.
  • Apply to one lane per cycle at the new-graduate level. SOOP's 공채 lanes do not cross-apply, and submitting to the wrong lane (or to multiple lanes in a single cycle) signals that you have not done the work to understand the organization. For 수시 experienced hiring, applying to multiple distinct postings is acceptable as long as each application is genuinely tailored to the specific role.
  • If you are applying from outside Korea, plan around possible IP-sensitivity friction with the Korean portal. Use a stable Korean residential or university connection where possible, and complete the application in a single session rather than relying on the portal's draft-save behavior, which is less robust than global ATS systems.

Interview Culture

SOOP's interview culture is recognizably modern Korean internet-platform: more relaxed than the financial chaebols, more formal than a Western consumer-internet startup, and unusually weighted on genuine product and community fluency. The company hires from a mix of the top Korean computer-science programs (SNU, KAIST, POSTECH, Yonsei, Korea, Hanyang, Sungkyunkwan, Sogang), the in-Seoul tier-2 programs that supply the bulk of working-level Korean tech talent, experienced hires from Naver, Kakao, Coupang, Krafton, Nexon, Smilegate, NCSoft, the Korean carriers and broadcasters, and a small but growing stream of returning Korean talent from US and Southeast Asian platforms. Interviewers across engineering, product, and content roles overwhelmingly come from inside the platform-team culture and bring an interview style that tests product fluency and operational seriousness alongside pure technical or domain depth. The most distinctive feature of a SOOP interview, particularly for product and content roles but increasingly also for engineering, is the live-and-honest product conversation. Interviewers will routinely ask candidates which BJs they watch, what categories they spend time in, what they would change about the discovery surface, how they would respond to a specific moderation incident, or how they would design a feature to retain mid-tail broadcasters. Thoughtful, honest answers grounded in real product use — even from a casual viewer perspective — outperform fabricated enthusiasm or memorized industry talking points. Candidates who try to pitch SOOP back its own marketing ('SOOP is the leading live-streaming platform in Korea') without specific product detail consistently underperform candidates who can speak to the actual experience of being a viewer, a small broadcaster, or a power-user of the chat. Engineering interviews are technically rigorous in a Korean-internet-platform mode: expect coding tests calibrated to lane and seniority (algorithm and data-structure problems for general backend, system-design questions for scaled live-streaming and chat for senior backend, mobile-specific tasks for iOS/Android, SQL and modeling for data and ML), a deep dive into recent projects with specific drilling on technical decisions and trade-offs, and behavioral questions about ownership, on-call, and incident handling. SOOP runs at meaningful Korean-internet scale, and interviewers will probe whether you have the operational instincts to ship and operate a real production service rather than just write the code. Product interviews include a product-sense case grounded in SOOP's own surfaces (broadcaster discovery, viewer retention, monetization, moderation, the chat experience, the global product), a metrics and analytics case, and behavioral questions about cross-functional collaboration, prioritization, and managing in ambiguity. Candidates who can speak fluently about the specific dynamics of two-sided creator-driven marketplaces — creator economics, the cold-start problem for new broadcasters, the trade-offs between top-broadcaster concentration and mid-tail health, the trust-and-safety challenges that come with live un-moderated content — consistently outperform candidates who default to generic consumer-product frameworks. Content and operations interviews lean heavily on scenario and role-play questions: a difficult BJ relationship that requires balancing the broadcaster's revenue importance against a moderation issue, a partnership negotiation, a public-relations incident response, the operational design of an esports tournament. Interviewers screen hard for judgment, calmness under pressure, and the ability to make trade-off decisions in messy real-time situations. The BJ 매니저 role specifically weighs interpersonal craft and the ability to manage difficult creator personalities at scale. The 임원 (executive) round skews more personal and strategic. Senior leaders, including division heads and sometimes Chung Chan-Yong-adjacent figures for senior hires, will probe career horizon, long-term commitment, view on the Korean live-streaming market and SOOP's position in it, view on the AfreecaTV-to-SOOP rebrand and the global push, and reconciliation of the BJ-driven creator economy with the trust-and-safety challenges that come with it. The company's stated values — community, broadcaster-first thinking, technical excellence in real-time platforms, and disciplined global expansion — show up consistently in how interviews are conducted. Compensation conversations are direct and grounded in Korean-internet-platform norms (not Korean-financial-chaebol norms, which are higher); equity is uncommon for individual contributors. Feedback loops between rounds are reasonably fast for a Korean tech company of SOOP's size, with most candidates hearing back within one to two weeks after each stage. The overall process from first contact to offer typically runs four to eight weeks for 수시 experienced hires and follows the published cycle calendar for 신입 공채.

What SOOP (AfreecaTV) Looks For

  • Genuine product and community fluency. SOOP screens hard for candidates who actually use the product, understand the BJ-viewer dynamic, and can speak to the live-streaming experience in concrete terms. Generic 'I love streaming, I want to work in Korean tech' framing reliably underperforms specific, honest engagement with the SOOP product, the broadcasters, the chat culture, and the differences between SOOP, Chzzk, YouTube Live, and Twitch.
  • Technical or domain craft calibrated to a real platform. Engineering candidates should demonstrate genuine depth in a defined area — live-streaming and real-time systems, mobile clients under heavy contention, scaled chat and messaging, recommendation and discovery, data engineering, trust-and-safety tooling, security, infrastructure — over generalist breadth. Product candidates should demonstrate two-sided-marketplace literacy. Content and operations candidates should demonstrate operational seriousness and judgment under pressure.
  • Comfort with the post-Twitch and rebrand context. SOOP is in the middle of an unusual strategic moment: a once-in-a-decade competitive windfall from Twitch's Korean exit, a deliberate global rebrand from AfreecaTV to SOOP, and a multi-year Southeast Asia expansion. Interviewers value candidates who understand and can engage seriously with that context, and who frame their interest around helping SOOP land that strategy rather than around generic prestige or growth.
  • High agency and ownership in fast-moving, ambiguous product environments. SOOP operates at the pace of a Korean internet platform under competitive pressure, not at the cadence of a slower-moving chaebol. Interviewers actively probe for evidence that candidates have driven projects forward without waiting for permission, taken ownership end-to-end, made and defended hard calls, and shipped under real production pressure.
  • Operational seriousness for content, broadcaster-relations, trust-and-safety, and esports roles. The BJ 매니저, content moderation, trust-and-safety, and esports operations functions are the operational backbone of the platform's revenue model and reputation. Candidates who have managed difficult partnerships at scale, made hard moderation calls, run live events, or operated under public scrutiny consistently outperform candidates with only theoretical exposure.
  • Bilingual or multilingual operating capability for global-expansion roles. The Thailand, Vietnam, and broader Southeast Asia organization is structurally a bilingual or trilingual environment. Korean-and-English is the baseline; Korean-and-Thai, Korean-and-Vietnamese, or Korean-and-Mandarin candidates with genuine working-level fluency in the relevant Southeast Asian language have a real, durable structural advantage for the regional roles.
  • Cultural fit with a long-tenure founder-CEO operating culture. CEO Chung Chan-Yong has run the company since 2007 and has a recognizable operating style — long-term-oriented, community-respectful, technically-serious, and disciplined about how the platform balances broadcaster revenue against trust-and-safety and brand health. Candidates who can operate well inside that culture — comfortable with structure where it exists, willing to push for change inside the founder-set strategic frame, and able to take long-horizon ownership of the work — fit better than candidates seeking a fast-cycling startup or a heavily-bureaucratic chaebol.
  • Long-term motivation aligned with SOOP's strategy. Candidates who frame their interest primarily around 'getting into Korean tech' or 'working at a streaming company' often read as undifferentiated. Candidates who can articulate why they want to help SOOP defend the post-Twitch Korean position, ship the global SOOP product into Southeast Asia, deepen the esports and entertainment-partnership franchise, or modernize the platform technically and brand-wise tend to land much better.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ATS does SOOP use to manage applications?
SOOP does not use Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, SuccessFactors, or any global ATS for its Seoul HQ pipeline. The official application portal is a custom Korean-built recruitment system hosted on the company's corporate domain (recruit.sooplive.co.kr / sooplive.co.kr → recruitment subsection, with the legacy afreecatv.com careers paths redirecting into the same flow during the rebrand transition). Job-aggregator listings on Wanted, JobKorea, Saramin, Catch, Jobplanet, Linkareer, Comento, and Programmers mirror SOOP's postings but the binding application must be submitted through the official SOOP recruit portal.
Why did AfreecaTV rebrand to SOOP, and is the company the same?
The October 2024 rebrand from AfreecaTV to SOOP was a deliberate strategic signal of a global product push and a maturing platform identity. The original AfreecaTV name (an acronym for 'Anyone can FREE broadCAsting') is difficult to scale internationally, and the company has chosen SOOP as a clean, short, English-friendly brand for its global expansion into Thailand, Vietnam, and the broader Southeast Asian region. The corporate entity, the KOSDAQ listing (ticker 067160), the founder-CEO Chung Chan-Yong, and the underlying Korean platform community, BJ relationships, virtual-gifting economy, and chat-driven culture are all continuous; the rebrand is a brand and global-product step, not a corporate restructuring.
How much did the Twitch Korea shutdown actually help SOOP?
Materially. Twitch announced in late 2023 that it would shut down operations in Korea, citing operating costs (particularly around Korean network usage fees) as roughly ten times higher than in other markets. The shutdown took effect on February 27, 2024. Public reporting and the company's own disclosures point to a roughly fifty-percent surge in SOOP's monthly active users in the months following the exit, alongside a substantial inflow of senior Korean Twitch broadcasters who signed migration deals with the platform. SOOP captured the larger share of the migration relative to Naver's Chzzk (which had also positioned for the exit), and the resulting concentration of broadcaster talent meaningfully strengthened SOOP's already-dominant Korean position. The post-Twitch boost is a real and current part of how the company operates and frames itself; candidates who understand this context land better in interviews.
Who is SOOP's main competitor now that Twitch has left Korea?
Inside Korea, the primary live-streaming competitor is Naver's Chzzk (치지직), which launched in beta in late 2023 and went general-availability in 2024 squarely to capture the Twitch-Korea exit. Chzzk is heavily resourced and technically polished, but has not displaced SOOP at the top of Korean live-streaming and has not yet replicated the depth of the BJ relationships, the virtual-gifting culture, or the esports broadcasting franchise that anchor SOOP's Korean business. YouTube Live is a perpetual cross-platform competitor for creator attention. Twitch remains a competitor in the international markets SOOP is expanding into (Thailand, Vietnam, the broader region) but no longer competes inside Korea. Beyond live-streaming pure-plays, SOOP also competes for advertising and creator attention against Naver, Kakao, the major Korean OTTs, and the global streaming platforms.
Does SOOP sponsor visas for foreign candidates?
Selectively, yes. SOOP is comparatively open to foreign applicants for engineering roles where the work is technical and the team can absorb an English-friendly seat, and is structurally more open to foreign applicants in the global-expansion organization where bilingual or trilingual operation is the entire point of the role (Thailand, Vietnam, broader Southeast Asia). Visa sponsorship is most commonly offered for senior engineering hires, specialized product roles, and the global business-development team. Foreign applicants should be explicit about their visa status (F-series, E-7, D-10, or convertible class) and their Korean-language ability (TOPIK 6 is the practical bar for HQ office work) in the application.
What is the SOOP interview process like end-to-end?
A typical experienced-hire (수시) loop runs four to eight weeks and includes a recruiter screen, a document-stage screen of the application essay or experienced-hire form, any required pre-interview assessments (a coding test for engineering candidates through Programmers or a similar Korean platform, a take-home case for some product and content roles), a 1차 working-level interview round with peers and managers from the applied team (60–90 minutes, lane-specific format including coding for engineering, product-sense case for product, scenario or role-play for content/operations), a 2차 임원 (executive) round with a smaller panel of senior leaders covering character and long-term commitment, and offer negotiation. New-graduate 공채 cycles follow the published cycle calendar with cohort onboarding ('연수원' residential training is more typical for chaebol financial firms; SOOP's onboarding is lighter-weight but does include a multi-week orientation program for cohort hires). Korean is the default interview language for Seoul HQ roles.
How important is using the SOOP product in interviews?
Unusually important. SOOP screens hard for genuine product and community fluency, particularly for product, content, and operations roles but increasingly also for engineering. Interviewers will routinely ask which BJs you watch, what categories you spend time in, what you would change about the discovery surface, and how the experience compares to Chzzk or YouTube Live. Honest, specific answers grounded in real viewer experience — even from a casual viewer perspective — outperform fabricated enthusiasm or memorized marketing talking points. Spend meaningful time on the product before interviewing, but do not pretend to be a power user if you are not; inauthenticity reads as worse than admitting a casual relationship.
What is SOOP's compensation structure like?
Compensation is paid in Korean won and follows Korean-internet-platform norms rather than Korean-financial-chaebol norms (which are higher). For 신입 공채 entry, base salary is largely fixed by cohort and role with limited room for negotiation. For 수시 experienced hires, base salary is negotiable within a market-calibrated range, typically supplemented by an annual cash bonus that varies by role and performance, comprehensive Korean health and pension benefits per labor-law standard, and a meal and commuting allowance. Equity is uncommon for individual contributors and is selectively used for senior leaders. Compensation in the global-expansion organization (Thailand, Vietnam, broader Southeast Asia) is calibrated to local-market norms with appropriate adjustments for senior or expatriate seats.
Is SOOP a stable employer given the post-Twitch boost and the global rebrand?
Yes — by mid-cap Korean internet standards, SOOP is a well-established, profitable, KOSDAQ-listed company with nearly two decades of continuous operation under the same founder-CEO. The post-Twitch boost was a material competitive windfall rather than a fragile growth driver, and the global rebrand is a deliberate strategic step rather than a sign of underlying instability. The honest risk vector is competitive: Naver's Chzzk is well-resourced and is the long-run competitive threat inside Korea, and the global expansion into Thailand, Vietnam, and the broader region is a real but unproven growth bet. Candidates evaluating SOOP should think about that competitive frame and ideally be motivated by helping the company land its current strategy rather than by assumed perpetual growth.
How important is Korean language ability for working at SOOP?
For Seoul HQ roles, Korean professional fluency (functionally TOPIK 6 or native-level for office work) is the baseline expectation for nearly every function — the recruit portal, the application essays, the interviews, the working-level meetings, and the day-to-day operating language are Korean. Some senior engineering and global-product roles can operate partly or fully in English at the candidate's request and the team's comfort, but this is the exception, not the default. For the global-expansion organization (Thailand, Vietnam, broader Southeast Asia), the relevant Southeast Asian language plus working English is more important than Korean, though Korean-and-the-regional-language candidates have a real structural advantage for the senior regional seats that interface back into the Seoul HQ.
What is the BJ 매니저 role at SOOP, and how do I get hired into it?
The BJ 매니저 (Broadcast Jockey Manager) role is the operational owner of broadcaster relationships at SOOP. BJ 매니저 are the front-line managers of the partnership terms, content guidance, escalation handling, and revenue-share administration for the broadcasters they cover, and the function as a whole is one of the operational backbones of the platform's creator economy. The role weighs interpersonal craft, the ability to manage difficult creator personalities at scale (BJs are by nature strong-willed entertainment personalities), the operational discipline to administer a large partnership portfolio, and the judgment to make trade-off calls under public scrutiny. Hiring runs through both 신입 공채 (with a content/operations lane) and 수시채용 (often for candidates with prior MCN, talent-management, esports operations, or entertainment-industry partnership backgrounds). Strong candidates surface concrete examples of partnership management, conflict resolution, and policy enforcement in their applications, and demonstrate genuine product and community fluency in interviews.
What is SOOP's global expansion strategy, and what kinds of roles are open in it?
SOOP's global expansion strategy under the new brand targets Thailand and Vietnam first, with a longer-horizon view toward the broader Southeast Asian region. The product runs on a substantially shared platform and infrastructure stack with the Korean SOOP, but with different growth strategies, monetization tuning, and content moderation profiles calibrated to each market. Open roles in the global organization span global-product PMs (creator tools, viewer experience, monetization for the international product), global-product engineers (the international product pod working closely with the Korean platform team), regional business development and creator partnerships (signing and managing top broadcasters in Thailand, Vietnam, and adjacent markets), regional marketing and growth, regional content and trust-and-safety operations, and regional support functions. These roles are structurally bilingual or trilingual; Thai, Vietnamese, English, and (for some senior roles interfacing back into Seoul) Korean are all weighted depending on the seat.

Open Positions

SOOP (AfreecaTV) currently has 6 open positions.

Check Your Resume Before Applying → View 6 open positions at SOOP (AfreecaTV)

Related Resources

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Sources

  1. SOOP Co., Ltd. — Official Corporate Site (Korean) —
  2. SOOP Co., Ltd. — Recruitment Portal —
  3. SOOP Co., Ltd. (KOSDAQ: 067160) — KRX Listing —
  4. Twitch — Discontinuing the Twitch Service in Korea (Official Announcement) —
  5. AfreecaTV Renames Itself to SOOP, Targets Global Expansion —
  6. Naver Chzzk (치지직) — Official Service Page —
  7. AfreecaTV Starcraft League (ASL) — Official Liquipedia Reference —