Senior Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform

Details

Ready to be pushed beyond what you think you’re capable of?

At Coinbase, our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world. Achieving that goal requires not just great products, but a world-class data foundation beneath them. The Data Platform team is the engine that makes Coinbase's data reliable, fast, and accessible at scale — powering everything from fraud detection and financial reporting to the AI and ML systems that will define Coinbase's next decade.

While many roles at Coinbase are remote-first, we are not remote-only. In-person participation is required throughout the year. Team and company-wide offsites are held multiple times annually to foster collaboration, connection, and alignment. Attendance is expected and fully supported.

The Role

We are looking for a visionary, hands-on Senior Staff Software Engineer to help define and lead the technical strategy for Coinbase's Data Platform. This is a foundational role at the intersection of distributed systems, data engineering, and AI-readiness. You will report into the Senior Director of Engineering, Data Platform, and serve as the domain's top technical leader. You will set architectural direction, mentor and elevate engineering talent, drive multi-quarter roadmaps, and be a key voice in shaping how Coinbase evolves from a collection of managed data services into a true, scalable data platform. This role operates with significant autonomy and is expected to have impact across multiple cross-functional teams and the broader Infrastructure organization.

Job ID# P75554

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical strategy and architecture for Data Platform across data ingestion, transformation, warehousing, streaming, and serving systems.
• Develop and execute multi-quarter roadmaps that transition the team from operational cost-saving toward engineering-led cost reduction, rethinking how cost scales with infrastructure.
• Architect data infrastructure to natively support AI and ML workloads, ensuring data pipelines, data lake infrastructure, and compute systems can power fraud and other AI models and modern multi-agent AI architectures.
• Drive the evolution to near-real-time data availability so downstream teams can act on fresher data across the company.
• Promote a builder mindset: push the team to build data infrastructure that creates compounding leverage.
• Build cross-functional alignment and secure commitment from senior leadership and partners (product, infrastructure, data engineering, analytics, ML, privacy, security, 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.

Requirements

• Deep experience building and operating large-scale distributed data infrastructure — streaming platforms, data lakes, batch and real-time processing engines, and query/serving layers.
• Strong systems thinking: understand the full data lifecycle and reason about performance, reliability, cost, security and privacy at each layer.
• Proven experience moving teams from managed-service dependency toward engineering-built, platform-grade infrastructure.
• A platform mindset: think like a product manager for data infrastructure — empathetic to developer customers, focused on reducing friction, and obsessed with leverage.
• Experience designing data systems that support ML training pipelines, feature stores, real-time inference, or AI agent workloads at scale.
• Proven track record owning the technical strategy and architecture for an entire domain across multiple teams.
• Demonstrated ability to responsibly use generative AI tools and copilots (examples given: LibreChat, Gemini, Glean) in daily workflows, continuously learn as tools evolve, and apply human-in-the-loop practices to deliver business-ready outputs and improve efficiency, cost, and quality.

Nice to Have

• Experience at high-scale tech-forward fintech, crypto, or financial services companies.
• Familiarity with compliance, data governance, or regulatory data requirements.
• Experience with change data capture (CDC), Kafka Connect, or real-time ETL pipelines.
• Experience working on Databricks and/or Snowflake.
• Experience operating large scale data platforms on public cloud infrastructure.
• Background contributing to open-source data infrastructure projects.

Compensation

Annual base salary range (excluding bonus): $253,895 — $298,700 USD. Total compensation may also include bonus eligibility and benefits (including medical, dental, vision and 401(k)).

Other Information

• Coinbase is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider applicants without regard to protected characteristics. Coinbase participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.
• Global Data Privacy Notice for Job Candidates and Applicants applies; by submitting your application you agree to processing of applicant data per location rules.
• AI Disclosure: For select roles Coinbase is piloting AI tools for initial screening interviews and AI interview intelligence platforms to transcribe and summarize interview notes. These pilots are for testing purposes and Coinbase will not use AI to make decisions impacting employment.