Joonggonara, Korea's largest secondhand goods marketplace, has appointed Kong Ja-yoon as its new chief technology officer (CTO) to strengthen platform competitiveness and enhance company-wide artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, the company said Tuesday.
Kong will oversee the operation of Joonggonara's technology organization and the formulation of its AI strategy. With 18 years of experience in large-scale platform development and operations at LG CNS and SK Planet, he joined Joonggonara last year and led the web development team, contributing to the advancement of web architecture and the stabilization of development and operations systems. He also spearheaded major projects including the safe compensation program, AI-powered product listing features, and the integrated shipping fee payment system, working to strengthen service competitiveness.
Joonggonara said it highly valued Kong's deep understanding of platform technology, extensive operational experience, and proven ability to translate technology strategy into business results.
With this appointment, Joonggonara plans to strengthen its technological capabilities to enhance transaction safety and service quality, while accelerating AI transformation across the entire company. To this end, the company will establish dedicated AX and data teams within its technology organization and build a collaborative framework to expand the application of AI-based initiatives across services and operations.
In particular, the company will build an "AI-ready Data" foundation that enables systematic use of data across key areas such as products, payments, search, recommendations, and customer service (CS). Based on this foundation, Joonggonara plans to advance its AI-based fraud detection models and personalized recommendation systems to improve user convenience and transaction reliability.
