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.
Staff Software Engineer, Customer Administration
The Customer Administration Engineering (CAE) team is a core pillar of Coinbase's Enterprise Applications and Architecture (EAA) org, responsible for building and operating the secure, foundational platforms that power customer data operations across Coinbase. Our flagship product, Control Center, is Coinbase's secure system of action for internal specialists across CX, Compliance, Legal, Global Investigations, Trust and Risk, and dozens of other teams. It serves approximately 7,000 internal users via its UI and powers a growing ecosystem of internal tools and AI automation via its backend APIs and MCP. We are at an exciting inflection point: evolving Control Center from a human-specialist UI into a modular, AI-agent-ready operations platform. As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a technical anchor for the CAE team, driving architectural decisions, mentoring engineers, and leading the delivery of high-impact, cross-cutting platform capabilities.
What You'll Do
- Architect and deliver foundational platform capabilities including MCP tool registries, AI orchestration layers, risk-based access automation, and the away-team contribution model that enables product groups across Coinbase to build on the platform safely and at speed
- Drive the evolution of Control Center into an AI-agent-ready, headless operations platform, designing and implementing MCP procedure constructs, agentic guardrails, HITL orchestration, and evaluation frameworks that enable both human and autonomous AI agents to execute sensitive customer operations securely
- Partner with the Engineering Manager and Product counterparts to define architectural roadmaps, author TDDs, lead design reviews, decompose complex initiatives into deliverable milestones, and raise the engineering quality bar through code review and mentorship
- Build and maintain highly reliable, secure, distributed backend services, owning SLO definitions, observability instrumentation, incident response, and operational readiness for Tier-1 platform systems
- Collaborate across EAA engineering teams, Product Engineering, and Security Engineering to deliver cross-functional outcomes and drive shared platform primitives that eliminate duplicated infrastructure across the portfolio
- 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record of architecting and delivering large-scale, high-traffic distributed systems in production, including deep proficiency in backend service design, API development (gRPC, MCP, GraphQL), and scalable microservices architectures
- Proven ability to independently lead ambiguous, high-impact technical initiatives from whiteboard to production, writing high-quality, well-tested code and setting the standard for others across complex, multi-team problem spaces
- Strong experience with cloud-native infrastructure and the modern backend stack: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, BuildKite/CircleCI, event-driven architectures (Kafka, MQ), distributed caching (Redis/Memcached), and proficiency in SQL and/or NoSQL databases
- Track record of building secure, compliant internal tools or platforms, with deep appreciation for security controls, access management, audit logging, data governance, and engineering rigor in a regulated financial services environment
- Experience building or integrating with agentic AI systems, including MCP servers, LLM orchestration layers, RAG pipelines, HITL workflows, or evaluation and guardrail frameworks for production agentic workloads
- Proficiency in Go (Golang) as a primary backend language, with willingness to work across Python where applicable in the evolving AI stack
- Utilizes generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.
Pay Transparency Notice: The target annual base salary for this position can range as detailed below. Total compensation may also include equity and bonus eligibility and benefits (including medical, dental, and vision).
- 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
- 8+ years hands-on software engineering experience building large-scale, high-traffic distributed systems
- Deep proficiency in backend service design and API development (gRPC, MCP, GraphQL)
- Experience with scalable microservices architectures and event-driven systems (Kafka, MQ)
- Strong experience with cloud-native infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform
- CI/CD experience (BuildKite or CircleCI)
- Distributed caching experience (Redis or Memcached)
- Proficiency in SQL and/or NoSQL databases
- Track record building secure, compliant internal tools with access controls, audit logging, and data governance
- Experience building or integrating with agentic AI systems (MCP servers, LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, HITL workflows, guardrails)
- Proficiency in Go (Golang) as primary backend language; willingness to work in Python where applicable
- Proven ability to lead ambiguous, high-impact technical initiatives from design to production and mentor engineers
- Operational ownership experience: defining SLOs, observability instrumentation, incident response, operational readiness for Tier-1 systems
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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