Senior Staff Software Engineer, Institutional Exchange

Details

Coinbase is building the future of institutional trading through its Institutional Everything Exchange, powering systems that enable major financial institutions to trade across markets with speed, depth, and trust. The Exchange team operates matching engine, order management, market data, and unified trading systems supporting billions of dollars in daily volume.

This role sets the architectural direction for core Exchange systems and serves as the senior technical voice across multiple teams, making decisions involving latency, correctness, and resilience.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for a core Exchange domain, driving multi-quarter initiatives from ambiguity through incremental milestones to delivery.
• Lead the design of ultra-low-latency, event-sourced trading systems spanning matching, risk, and market data across cloud and colocated environments.
• Drive cross-team technical alignment across Exchange, Prime, and Derivatives, securing commitment from senior engineering and product leadership.
• Set and inspect the quality bar across teams, including deterministic testing, failover design, incident leadership, and operational standards for 24/7 markets.
• Maintain significant hands-on contribution while leading execution through other senior engineers and technical leads.
• Mentor L5-L6 engineers and develop the next level of technical leadership on a lean, high-leverage team.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant ownership of production trading, exchange, or market-data systems at scale.
• Deep expertise in low-latency distributed systems and a backend language such as Java, C++, or Go, with fluency in JVM/Linux performance tuning.
• Demonstrated architectural ownership of an end-to-end trading platform, including order management, multi-venue connectivity, and real-time risk.
• Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Experience operating latency-sensitive systems in on-premises, colocated, and cloud environments, including incident command and safe production changes.
• Genuine interest in crypto and institutional markets, with the ability to ramp quickly. Deep crypto experience is a plus but is not required.
• Ability to use generative AI responsibly, maintaining human oversight to deliver business-ready outputs and drive measurable improvements in workflow efficiency, cost, and quality.

Benefits

• Total compensation may include equity and bonus eligibility.
• Benefits include medical, dental, vision, and 401(k).
• Coinbase is a remote-first, but not remote-only, company. Employees are expected to meet quarterly for in-person working sessions called “surges.”

Compensation

Annual base salary range, excluding equity and bonus: $262,650–$309,000 USD, varying by location.

Candidates may submit a maximum of three applications within a six-month period. Coinbase is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities.