Ready to do the most impactful work of your career? At Coinbase, we are uncompromising on our mission to increase economic freedom. The bar is high, the environment is intense, and we like it that way. This isn't a place for complacency, it’s a place to be pushed past your perceived limits. If you're ready to build the future of finance alongside people who refuse to settle for "good enough," you belong here. Coinbase is a remote-first, but not remote-only company. Expect to get together quarterly for intense in-person working sessions called “surges.” learn more about working at Coinbase.
As a Senior Staff Software Engineer on the Data Platform team within the Platform group, you'll define and lead the technical strategy for Coinbase's data infrastructure, spanning ingestion, transformation, warehousing, streaming, and serving systems. This is a foundational role at the intersection of distributed systems, data engineering, and AI-readiness, reporting to the Senior Director of Engineering. You'll set architectural direction, drive multi-quarter roadmaps, and transition the organization from managed-service dependency toward engineering-built, platform-grade infrastructure that powers everything from fraud detection to modern multi-agent AI architectures.
What you'll do:
- Own the technical strategy and architecture for Data Platform, setting direction across data ingestion, transformation, warehousing, streaming, and serving systems while driving engineering-led cost reduction at the infrastructure layer.
- Architect data infrastructure to natively support AI and ML workloads, ensuring pipelines, data lake systems, and compute can power ML training, feature stores, real-time inference, and multi-agent AI architectures at scale.
- Drive the evolution to near-real-time data availability, enabling downstream teams across the company to act on fresher data for fraud detection, financial reporting, and analytics.
- Build alignment and secure commitment from senior leadership and cross-functional partners across product, infrastructure, analytics, ML, privacy, security, and compliance on technical priorities and tradeoffs.
- Serve as the primary technical voice for Data Platform in org-wide forums including OKR planning, architecture reviews, and long-term infrastructure strategy, while mentoring and elevating senior engineering talent.
Required Skills and Experience:
- 12+ years building and operating large-scale distributed data infrastructure, including streaming platforms, data lakes, batch and real-time processing engines, and query/serving layers.
- Proven track record owning end-to-end technical strategy and architecture for an entire data domain across multiple teams, with demonstrated success transitioning organizations from managed-service dependency toward platform-grade, engineering-built infrastructure.
- Deep systems thinking across the full data lifecycle, with the ability to reason about performance, reliability, cost, security, and privacy at each layer.
- Demonstrated experience designing data systems that support ML training pipelines, feature stores, real-time inference, or AI agent workloads at scale, with familiarity across technologies such as CDC, Kafka, Databricks, Snowflake, or similar.
- Platform mindset with a product-manager orientation toward data infrastructure, focused on reducing friction for developer customers and creating compounding leverage.
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Job ID#: P75554
Pay Transparency Notice: Base salary varies by location (see range below). Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility, and benefits (medical, dental, vision, 401(k)).
- Application Limit: Candidates may submit a maximum of 3 applications within a 6-month period.
- Equal Opportunity Employer: Coinbase is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or genetic information. Applicants with criminal histories will be considered consistent with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
- US Applicants: View Employee Rights, Know Your Rights, and E-Verify Notice of Participation.
- Accommodations: If you are an individual with a disability who needs a reasonable accommodation, email us your request and contact info at accommodations[at]coinbase.com. Need screen reading technology? Click here to download a free compatible screen reader and view the tutorial.
- Data Privacy & Arbitration: By submitting your application, you agree to our Candidate Privacy Notice. US applicants: By submitting your application, you agree to Arbitration of Disputes.
- AI Disclosure: Coinbase is piloting an AI tool based on machine learning technologies to conduct initial screening interviews to qualified applicants. The tool simulates realistic interview scenarios and engages in dynamic conversation. Coinbase is also piloting an AI interview intelligence platform to transcribe and summarize interview notes, allowing our interviewers to fully focus on you as the candidate. Coinbase will not use AI to make decisions impacting employment.
Skills Required
- Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed data infrastructure
- Strong systems thinking about performance, reliability, cost, security and privacy
- Proven experience moving teams from managed-service dependency to platform-grade infrastructure
- Experience designing data systems for ML training and inference at scale
- Proven track record owning technical strategy for an entire domain
What the Team is Saying
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Coinbase Compensation & Benefits Highlights
How does Coinbase ensure its pay and bonus plans are competitive?
Coinbase uses a market-driven, pay-for-performance approach to keep pay and bonus plans competitive. Coinbase regularly benchmarks roles against leading technology and fintech companies using external market data and reviews its compensation programs on a recurring basis to ensure salary, bonus, and equity remain aligned with the broader market and business goals. Annual bonus and equity programs are tied to both company results and individual impact, so when Coinbase and its people perform, total rewards reflect that performance.
Coinbase Insights
What We Do
Crypto creates economic freedom by ensuring that people can participate fairly in the economy, and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) is on a mission to increase economic freedom for more than 1 billion people. We’re updating the century-old financial system by providing a trusted platform that makes it easy for people and institutions to engage with crypto assets, including trading, staking, safekeeping, spending, and fast, free global transfers. We also provide critical infrastructure for onchain activity and support builders who share our vision that onchain is the new online. And together with the crypto community, we advocate for responsible rules to make the benefits of crypto available around the world.
Why Work With Us
We have the opportunity to accelerate the pace of innovation in the world by building an open financial system. Our vision is to create more economic freedom in the world, to help people control their own wealth, start companies, have financial privacy, and participate in the global economy. And to get us there, we focus, build and move as a team.
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Employees work remotely.
Coinbase is remote-first, which enables us to innovate, build and move quickly. Our teams are able to work effectively from around the globe with time for in-person offsites and team meetups to enhance collaboration and connection.
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